III. The Chief Moral Facts of the Period
Introductory
In the present division of this chapter it will be our aim merely to indicate the essential facts in the moral history of the earlier medieval centuries. Some of these facts will serve to show in how remarkable a manner the age was dominated by the monastic conception of good life, while others will simply reveal the historical outworkings, in its more general manifestations, of the new conscience brought into the world by Christianity.
The ideal of the saint and that of the hero: “Dialogue between Oisin and St. Patrick”
As a prelude to the brief review proposed we shall do well to consider for a moment the contrariety between the new ideal of the Christian monk and the old ideal of the pagan hero as this oppositeness emerges in the so-called “Dialogue between Oisin and St. Patrick.”[643] This poem discloses most impressively the vast revolution which the incoming of Christianity effected in the moral feelings and judgments of men.
Oisin, “the blind Homer of Erin,” is represented as in his old age entering into a controversy with the saint respecting the relative merits of the monk’s and the hero’s conception of worthiness. The dialogue runs as follows:
St. Patrick. Oisin, long is thy slumber, arise and listen to the psalm; forsaken is thy activity, forsaken thy strength, yet wouldst thou delight in battle and wild uproar.
Oisin. My swiftness and my strength have deserted me since the Fenii, with Fionn their chief, are no longer alive; for clerks I have no attachment, and their melodies are not sweet to me.
* * * * *
O Patrick, hard is thy service, and shameful is it for you to reproach me for my appearance; if Fionn lived, and the Fenii, I would forsake the clergy of the cross.
* * * * *
Patrick, pray thou to the God of heaven for Fionn of the Fenii and for his children, making entreaty of the prince, whose equal I have never heard of.
St. Patrick. O learned man, I desire not strife with thee, but I will not make request to heaven for Fionn, for all the actions of his life were to be in love and to urge the sounding chase.
Oisin. If you were to be in company with the Fenii, O clerk of clergy and of bells, not for long wouldst thou be able to give heed to the God of truth, and serve the clergy.
St. Patrick. ... Oisin, the remainder of your life is short, and badly will you fare if you despise the clergy.
Oisin. Small is my esteem for thyself and clergy, O holy Patrick of the crozier: I have greater regard for Fionn, the white-handed king of the Fenii, but he is not near me now.
Mournful I am without his hounds bounding, and his dogs all around me; if they and their agile hero were alive, Patrick, you would have to fear rebuke from me.
St. Patrick. In that way did you and the Fenii of Erin forsake heaven: you never submitted to religion, but ever put confidence in strength of limbs, and in battles.
Oisin. Were Fionn alive, and the Fenii comely and warlike, with their hounds running propitiously, they would seem to me more majestic than those who dwell in heaven.
St. Patrick. Desolate are the Fenii, without slumber or liberty in the house of torment, for never in any way did they render service to the Holy Father.
* * * * *
Oisin. Fionn delighted in strokes upon shields, in conquering heroes, and hunting on hills; the sound of his dogs in toil was more melodious to me than the preaching of clerks in church of bells.
* * * * *
St. Patrick. It is because his time and delight were taken up by pleasures of the chase, and the array of warlike hosts; and because he never thought about God, that Fionn of the Fenii is in thralldom.
He is now shut up in torment; all his generosity and wealth do not avail him now, for lack of piety toward God, for this he is in sorrow, in the mansion of pain.
Oisin. Little do I believe in thy speech, thou man from Rome with white books, that Fionn the generous hero is now with demons and devils.
* * * * *
O Patrick, doleful is the story: Fionn the hospitable to be under locks! heart without malice and without aversion, heart stern in defense of battle.
St. Patrick. However great the number of troops fighting for Fionn, he did not act the will of God above: his crimes are above him in pains of fire, forever in anguish.
Oisin. It is plain that your God does not delight in giving gold and food to others: Fionn never refused strong or weak, and shall he receive hell for his abode!!!
St. Patrick. However much he may have divided gold and venison, hard are his bonds in the den of pains: no glimpse of light for him, no sight of brightness such as he first received from God.
* * * * *
Oisin. Patrick, inquire of God if He remembers the Fenii when alive: ask if, east or west, He ever saw men better in conflict.
Or did He observe in His own country, although it is high above us, for sense, for conflict, or for strength, any man good in comparison with Fionn?
* * * * *
Patrick, I am wretched, a poor bard, ever changing residence, without power, without activity, without force, journeying to mass and altars.
Without good food, without getting wealth and booty, without play in athletic games; without going a-wooing and hunting, two objects for which I always longed.
Without reciting deeds of champions, without bearing spear; alas! I have lost Osgur and Fionn, and I am left standing like a withered tree, out under injury.
St. Patrick. Cease, O Bard! Leave off thy folly; you have as yet said but little in favour of yourself: think of the torments that await you; the Fenii are departed, and ere long you will go likewise.
* * * * *
Oisin. I will not obey you, O Patrick, though great your creed and faith. I own without lie that firm is my belief that the devil will be your portion.
* * * * *
I would rather return to the Fenii once more, O Patrick, if they were alive, than go to the heaven of Jesus Christ, to be forever under tribute to Him.
St. Patrick. O withered Bard, thou art foolish; thou wouldst not pay tribute to any one if thou wast in the heaven of Jesus Christ, nor wouldst thou witness battle and uproar.
Oisin. I would rather be in Fionn’s court harkening to the voices of hounds every morning, and meditating on hard-fought battles, than in the court of Jesus Christ; that is certain.
* * * * *
It was easier for me to obtain without fail both meat and drink in Fionn’s court than in thy mansion, and in the dwelling of the Son of God, O Patrick, not generous in dividing.
* * * * *
St. Patrick. It is better for thee to be with me and the clergy, as thou art, than to be with Fionn and the Fenii, for they are in hell without order of release.
Oisin. By thy book and its meaning, by thy crozier and by thy image, better were it for me to share their torments, rather than be among the clergy continually talking.
* * * * *
Ah! Patrick, your religion may be great; but I have not, up to this day, witnessed among ye dinner nor banquet like banquet of the Fenii.
St. Patrick. Although Fionn spent generously all he obtained by strength, fleetness, and plunder, he is now sorrowful in the mansion of a lord who furnishes no dinner, and demons torment him forever.
Oisin. It would be pitiful and mournful, if thy story were true, ah Patrick! for all the saints who are in heaven, if they were to strive with Fionn in contest of liberality, could not obtain the victory over him.
* * * * *
Tell to me without controversy what is the reason of the custom you have to be ever beating your breasts, and each evening kneeling under gloom?
St. Patrick. I tell thee that it is not because we have scarcity of food and of drink that we are under armour (watching), but because we desire to be perpetually on our guard against gluttony.
Oisin. It is not fear of gluttony, nor in dread of king of saints that I receive for myself scarcity of bread, but because I am not able to obtain it from the clergy.
Astonishment is upon me to witness the greatness of your love for the man you call Christ, if hereafter he will perpetually upbraid you for the abundance of your portions and of your drink!
Farewell to Fionn of the noble Fenii; with him was ample banquet and division; he was not like the man who is called God; and moreover he gave without waiting for remuneration.... Never at any time did I witness him asking for kneeling and bitter weeping.[644]
But vain was the lament of the blind bard. The ideal of the pagan hero, whose fame he vaunted, had lost its primal appeal. It was the ideal of the cloister, incarnate in the “saint of many prayers and many vigils,” that was now enthralling the affections and shaping the consciences of men.
The monasteries as the cradle of the modern social conscience
In the course of a few generations the vast enthusiasm awakened for the ascetic life covered all Christian lands with convents and monasteries, which in their ethical influence constituted one of the most important of the institutions of the Church. In truth, the monasteries stand in closer and more vital relation than does any other ecclesiastical institution to the ethical evolution of the Western world. The service they rendered to civilization in preserving and transmitting to the modern world various elements of the intellectual and material cultures of antiquity has been fully recognized and gratefully acknowledged; but not so full justice has been rendered them for their contribution to the moral life of modern times. Yet it is probably true that the most precious thing conserved by the monasteries from the wreck of ancient civilization was that social conscience which was generated in the heart of old Judaism and bequeathed to Christianity. Professor Nash, in his work entitled The Genesis of the New Social Conscience, maintains, and we think with right, that the distinctive qualities of the modern conscience—tenderness for the unfortunate, a lofty altruism, a noble capacity for self-sacrifice—were qualities conserved and cradled in the medieval monasteries.
This view of the relation of the monasteries to the moral evolution in Western civilization may be accepted by the student of morals as a correct interpretation of medieval monastic history, while at the same time he admits the truth of Lecky’s contention that there was a self-regarding motive in Christian asceticism—it was personal salvation, he says, that the monk was primarily seeking—which made the morality of the Christian saints inferior to the morality of the heroes of Greece and Rome. It is undoubtedly true that many entered upon the monastic life from self-regarding motives; but it is also true that constant meditation upon religious themes, and especially the holding ever before the imagination the ideal of the Master, who for love of man made the supreme self-sacrifice of the Cross, had as a natural result the deepening of the altruistic feelings, the sensitizing of the conscience, and the moving of the will to self-denying service for others. As a consequence the spirit of true self-renunciation was often exalted among the recluses of the cloister to an unwonted degree, and thus it came about in the course of time that many who out of solicitude for their own salvation had sought the solitude of the cloister are later found in the outside world, going about, in imitation of their Master, doing good, ministering in the spirit of absolute self-forgetfulness to the needs, temporal as well as spiritual, of the poor, the afflicted, the heavy-laden, and the life-weary. A large part of the philanthropic work of the Church during the Middle Ages was carried on by the monks.
This humanitarian spirit, this cloister conscience of monasticism, was bequeathed to society at large. Thus may the direct line of descent of the modern social conscience be traced through the medieval monasteries.
The new conscience condemns and finally suppresses the gladiatorial games
One of the earliest and the most important of the moral reforms effected by the new conscience in the institutions of pagan Rome was the suppression of the gladiatorial games. For almost seven hundred years preceding the triumph of Christianity in the Roman world, these spectacles had formed the favorite amusement of the Roman people without having awakened any special moral protest. Some of the pagan philosophers and moralists, particularly Seneca and Plutarch, had denounced them as opposed to the sentiment of humanity, but their protest had found no echo in the common conscience of the age. As a rule the pagan moralists saw nothing in them to condemn.
It was reserved for the Christian moralists to awaken the conscience to a recognition of the criminality of these cruel spectacles. It was particularly the Christian teaching of the sacredness of human life that contributed powerfully to create the new ethical feeling as to the immoral character of these amusements, and prepared the way for their final abolition (404 A.D.) through the protest made by the monk Telemachus and sealed by his martyr death.
Speaking of the significance of the abolition of the gladiatorial games, Lecky declares that “there is scarcely any other reform so important in the moral history of mankind.”[645] One thing which enhanced greatly the importance of the reform was its timeliness. Just at the moment of the suppression of these spectacles the Germanic tribes were passing the frontiers of the Empire and adopting the customs and institutions of the Romans. Had not these amusements been abolished or put under the ban of the moral feelings before the final catastrophe to the Empire, the barbarian tastes and fighting instincts of this new race would have led to the eager introduction of these sports into all the northern countries, just as certainly as the humane spirit of the Greeks prevented their general introduction into Grecian lands. When we recall the indurating and dehumanizing effects of these amusements upon the Roman populace, we realize the importance and timeliness of the reform which kept the barbarian nations free from their brutalizing and deadening influence.
The new conscience condemns infanticide and self-destruction
Equally emphatic was the condemnation which the new conscience pronounced on infanticide and self-destruction. We have seen in our review of the morality of the classical peoples how almost universal was the practice of the exposition of infants, and how slight was the moral condemnation which the custom evoked even from philosophers and moralists. When the practice was prohibited, usually the prohibition sprang from considerations of a prudential or economic character rather than from scruples of conscience.
But the Christian teachers, proclaiming the sacredness of human life and the immortal destiny of every human soul, declared the destruction of the infant as sinful as the taking of the life of the adult. It is to this teaching doubtless that is, in large measure, due the existence in Christian lands of a conscience which condemns the destruction of the newborn babe as an act of deep moral turpitude.
It was the same Christian doctrine of the sacredness of human life, along with the teaching of the duty of resignation, that created also a new moral feeling in regard to suicide. We have seen how the conscience of the classical peoples in general passed no condemnation upon the act of self-destruction if life had in any way become a burden; but the Church taught that suicide is the same as murder, indeed a greater sin because it destroys not only the body but also the soul. Some Christian moralists maintained that “Judas committed a greater sin in killing himself than in betraying his master Christ.”[646]
Throughout the Middle Ages, under the influence of the Church, the act of self-destruction was regarded with the greatest abhorrence,[647] and without that commingling of tenderness and pity which with us has come to temper the feeling of condemnation.
The great missionary propaganda as an expression of Christian altruism
But the new conscience found most characteristic expression not in its restraints and prohibitions but in its impulsions to altruistic activity and endeavor. In our account of the primitive ethical ideals of Greece and Rome we noticed how the virtue of altruism or self-abnegation for the common good was hidden under the guise of courage.[648] It was therefore no new virtue which Christianity brought into the world when it proclaimed the supreme moral excellence of self-renunciation for others. What it did was to widen the circle of those for whom the supreme sacrifice should be made, and to give the virtue fuller and richer content. It thus imparted fresh impulse to that altruistic movement which we have seen to characterize the last centuries of the civilization of Greco-Roman antiquity. The deepened ethical sentiment found various forms of expression, but the most important of these was the great missionary propaganda which, during the centuries from the sixth to the ninth, carried the new gospel to the pagan German tribes of Europe. Lecky regards this as the chief altruistic movement of the medieval period.
This conquest of the continent for Christianity was effected in large part by men whose fervid zeal for social service had been kindled in the quiet and holy atmosphere of the cloister.[649] The movement was inspired and maintained by that same spirit of self-devotion which animated the missionaries of the apostolic age of Christianity. The declaration of the first great apostle to the gentiles, St. Paul, that he would himself willingly be a castaway if thereby he might secure the salvation of others, could have been made by many a self-devoted monk-apostle who won a like crown of martyrdom. In the romance of Christian missions the monastic chronicles of Iona and Lindisfarne and St. Gall, and the tales of the labors and martyrdom of Saints Columba, Wilfrid, Boniface, and a great company of others will never cease to enthrall the imagination so long as the virtue of self-renunciation is esteemed and reverenced among men.
This great missionary movement which brought within the pale of the Church the northern peoples is of transcendent interest to the student of the history of morals, not merely because it is such a splendid exhibition of the altruistic spirit of Christianity, but also because the success of these medieval missions meant, besides the winning of the barbarians to a new religion, the winning of them to a new moral life; for to give a people a new religion is to give them also a new conscience.
Almsgiving and the founding of charitable institutions
The altruistic spirit of the new religion found a second expression in charity, in the sense of almsgiving to the poor and the wretched. This was not a new virtue any more than that of general benevolence. It was never, it is true, a prominent virtue with the Greeks and Romans, but it had always been given a place among the cardinal virtues by all the great ethical religions of the East. Judaism laid special stress upon the duty of open-handedness to the poor, while Buddhism made it a rudimentary virtue.[650] Christianity inherited from Judaism this attractive virtue and laid a fresh emphasis upon it. Since the incoming of Christianity the poor and the afflicted have been cared for in a spirit of compassion and tenderness never before known in the history of the Western races. Asylums and hospitals and charitable institutions of every kind have multiplied in number and have been increased in effectiveness in relieving want and distress as the centuries have passed, until these endowments and provisions have become a distinctive feature of Christian civilization. In the period we are here reviewing, and throughout the later medieval ages, gifts to the monasteries were especially numerous and large, one reason for this being that the monks were looked upon as the almoners of society and “trustees for the poor.” The founding of hospitals and the endowing of infirmaries afforded another outlet for the unbounded charity of the age. The first Christian hospital was founded at Rome in the fourth century by a Roman lady named Fabiola, a widow of the ancient house of the Fabii, who also established a hospice for pilgrims at the mouth of the Tiber.[651]
The spirit of charity found further expression in the emancipation of slaves, and in the ransoming of prisoners of war, especially, after the rise of Islam, of Christian captives. Unfortunately the teaching of the Church respecting the possibility of possession by demons caused insanity to be regarded as obsession by an evil spirit, and for more than a thousand years this belief not only put the unhappy class of the insane outside the pale of Christian charity, but subjected them to the most cruel treatment that fear and superstition could devise.[652]
Mitigations of slavery
A religion or a philosophy which has for aim the reform and improvement of human society may act directly either upon the individual or upon institutions. Thus modern socialism ignores the individual, maintaining that the individual is the product of environment, and makes its direct proximate end and aim the reform of social and economic institutions. Through the improvement and perfection of these it would bring about the improvement and perfection of the individual, and thus usher in the era of equality, justice, and brotherhood among men.
Now the method of Christianity is exactly the reverse of this. Its appeal is made to the individual; it does not concern itself directly with social and industrial systems, or with governmental institutions and arrangements. It would reform society by reforming the individual. When Christianity entered the world Cæsarism had just established itself upon the ruins of republican and national freedom, but the Christian preachers said nothing about political liberty; the Master had said, “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.” The war system was in full vigor; after a period of Quakerism the Church first condoned, then accepted, and finally consecrated this heritage of barbarism as one of the necessary institutions of human society. The gladiatorial games were the sole important institution of antiquity which the Christian teachers absolutely condemned as an institution, and the abolition of which they persistently demanded and finally effected.
It was the same with slavery as with other social institutions. It existed everywhere when Christianity appeared, but the Christian teachers never preached abolition. The Christian emperors adopted, and for two centuries maintained practically unchanged, the pagan slave code. There were under these rulers, it is true, some ameliorations in the laws, due to Christian influence; thus cruel forms of punishment, as branding on the forehead or throwing from a precipice, were prohibited. With the exception of these minor isolated mitigations of the lot of the slave, slavery passed over into Christian civilization as an unchanged heritage from the ancient world, and continued to exist as a Christian institution until, through the action of various agencies, political and economic as well as moral, it was gradually transformed into serfdom. During the later centuries of its prevalence, however, Christian teachings softened many of the cruelties of the system, and caused, speaking generally, the individual slave to be treated with greater consideration and humanity.
The broadening moral movement in progress in the ancient world is checked
Unfortunately there were large offsets to the moral gains of which we have been speaking. Christianity had entered a world in which the most important ethical movement in progress was the broadening of the moral sympathies. The genius of the new religion, a genius inherited from the great prophets of Judaism, was well calculated to impart, as for a period it did, a fresh impulse to this cosmopolitan movement, and to foster and strengthen this growing sentiment of philanthropy and universal brotherhood. Its mission seemed to be to consummate the work of Greek philosophy and of Roman world conquest, to complete the obliteration of national boundaries, to throw down the partition wall between Greek and barbarian, Jew and gentile, patrician and plebeian, bond and free, and to make each man’s neighbor to be every fellow being of whatsoever race or class or creed.
But this spirit of genuine Christianity was soon obscured and the world movement toward ethical universalism obstructed and checked by the theological teaching which made moral merit and salvation dependent upon the acceptance of a prescribed creed. In place of the tribal and racial walls of division which had originally separated the communities of men and which the progress of events had thrown down, it raised a new partition wall which divided mankind into two great ethically artificial classes, believers and unbelievers, Christians and pagans. In place of the doctrine of race election it substituted the doctrine of individual election. Throughout a large part of the Christian period “infidels” and “heathen” have too often been to Christians what “gentiles” were to the “chosen people,” and “barbarians” to the intellectually elect Greeks.
Thus was the broadening and leveling movement which marked the later centuries of antiquity checked, while a new division as inimical to universal charity as the old divisions of race and cult was created.
St. Augustine as the representative of the narrowing movement
The representative and promoter of this retrograde movement in the moral domain was the African bishop St. Augustine. His “City of God,” viewed from one side, is altogether like unto the old city of man. It is simply the ancient classical city in its early period of aristocratic pride and exclusiveness before it had felt the broadening influence of a thousand years of varied experience and growing culture. Only a few can acquire citizenship in the new city. Its privileges are only for “the elect.” A great multitude, the nonelect, are left outside the city gates. Thus, in the words of Wedgwood, “all the arrogance, all the exclusiveness, all the love of privilege, for which the city of man no longer afforded any escape, found a refuge in the city of God.”[653]
The narrowing and hampering influence upon the moral development of the European peoples of this unethical system of Augustinian theology and metaphysics it would be difficult to exaggerate.
Loss of the virtue of toleration
The new division was even more of a hindrance in some respects than the old to the moral progress of the world; for there was not merely created a tendency to the limitation of Christian charity to the community of believers, but there was fostered an intolerant and persecuting spirit. The world into which Christianity entered was, speaking generally, a tolerant world. There were, it is true, persecutions for opinion’s sake in the pre-Christian age, but these were comparatively infrequent. In general, persecution in classical antiquity sprang from some other motive than dislike or fear of religious dissent, as we have seen to have been the case in the persecution of the Christians by the pagan emperors of Rome.[654]
But after the promulgation of the moral code of the Church, which made wrong belief or denial of the orthodox creed a fault of unmeasured criminality, toleration ceased to be a virtue and became a vice. Thus the virtue of toleration, which Lecky pronounces “the supreme attainment of Roman civilization,” was lost. Intolerance became a duty, and remained such for more than a thousand years, making a tragedy of centuries of European history. Wars of annihilation or subjection against pagans and infidels were waged, and the persecution of heretics was carried on with a hatred and ferocity in strange contrast to the unbounded charity and infinite tenderness of the Founder of the religion in the name of which these things were done.
This spirit of intolerance thus called into existence led, during the period under review, to the suppression, first, in the fourth century by the Christian emperors, of freedom of religious worship; and then quickly to the suppression of liberty of thought throughout Christendom.[655] By the opening of the sixth century no one in any Christian land could freely think or freely express his thought, even on philosophical themes. This retrograde movement in its ultimate consequences was one of the most far-reaching revolutions in the moral history of the Western world.
“Between moralities”; the new-forming ideal
Aside from the broad ethical movements traced above, induced by the Christian conception of life and its new valuation of particular virtues and duties, there was in this epoch a moral phenomenon of another sort which we must now notice, namely, the moral anarchy which characterized the later centuries of the period under review.
In an earlier chapter we spoke of the fusion of moral ideals which ultimately takes place when two races meet and unite to form a new race and a new culture.[656] But as Bagehot has pointed out, such a commingling of races is always attended by a special danger. It is likely for a time to produce “something not only between races, but between moralities.”[657]
In the fact here stated we must doubtless look for the explanation in part of the turbulent, anarchical character, ethically viewed, of the period which immediately followed the downfall of ancient civilization, and which saw the creation, out of Roman and barbarian elements, of the new Romano-German world. In the migrations and settlements of the German conquerors in the Roman provinces, and in the mixture of races which there took place, there resulted necessarily, on the one side, a break-up of all the old tribal relations which formed the basis of the morality of the barbarians, and, on the other side, the destruction of all the restraints and conventions which had formed the bulwark and stay of the more refined, if less simple and pure, morality of the Romans. With the old moral codes discredited, with ancestral ethical ideals disintegrated,[658] men stood, to use Bagehot’s phrase, not between races only but also between moralities, and the historical ethical evolution was broken by what has been aptly called a moral interregnum. The epoch covering the interval between the destruction of the Roman governmental system in the West in the fifth century and the establishment of a semblance of social order by Charlemagne toward the end of the eighth century, presents, according to the concurrent view of all chroniclers and historians of the period, one of the most appalling spectacles of moral anarchy afforded by the records of human history.
In the midst of this moral chaos, however, a new moral world was forming. Gradually, under various influences, racial, cultural, and religious, there was taking shape and form, through a fusion of different ethical elements, a new moral ideal, the ideal of knighthood, which for an epoch—throughout the crusading centuries—was to absorb a large part of the moral enthusiasm of Christendom, and to determine in great measure the character of the enterprises of the age.
Since one of the influences which produced this great transformation in the Christian ideal was the creed and moral code of Islam, we shall in our next chapter turn aside from following the ethical evolution among the European peoples to watch for a space the rise and progress of this new faith whose martial ethics was destined to leave so deep an impress upon the moral ideal of Christianity.