The Good Old Time And Our Own.
In the daily struggle for truth and right, in our hours of lassitude and discouragement, how willingly we believe that formerly the battle of life was less severe than nowadays. We love to compare ourselves with our predecessors, pigmies to us giants of the nineteenth century, and sincerely believe them so, either because of our short-sightedness or because of the great distance from which we regard them. But when, by the study of history, we have drawn nearer the distances which separate these epochs of the different evolutions of humanity, we become at the same time more modest and more courageous; more modest, because we know our fathers have had to struggle as much if not more than ourselves; more courageous, because by their example we learn how we should battle for triumph in moral struggles; and of these alone we would here speak.
Many of our contemporaries think they have done their duty if they have abused their own time, praised the past, and predicted a sombre future unable to confer upon us any blessings. It is so sweet to live in abstract contemplation of heroes or epochs of which inexorable time has deprived us; it is so easy to make an apology for them without combating the living men and the concrete ideas which in real history form the shadows to these brilliant pictures; it is so easy to choose from former ages models of virtue, of civil courage and faith, without preoccupying ourselves with obstacles that these just people, these citizens, these saints have conquered, and that our indifference, our idleness, our weakness, or our cowardice hinders us from looking fairly in the face, through the medium in which we live. We do not perceive often enough that the vulgar expression of the "good old time," which has been forbidden in every age, is in the moral history of a people a truly vicious circle. Indeed, we cannot pretend that every age is worth only so much, and, interpreting badly the proverb, "Man proposes, but God disposes," go to sleep in the false historical security called fatalism. It is legitimate to have our preferences for such and such an epoch, and it is not always difficult to give good reasons for them; but between these rational preferences and an unjustifiable disdain for our own time, there is an abyss.
To act with our own epoch we must love it; then we work with ardor and confidence for its reform. Who loves well, chastises well. I wish to show that our age merits to be loved as well as any other that has preceded it; and I will demonstrate this clearly by a moral, religious, and political sketch of the Christian age the most justly praised—the thirteenth. To circumscribe this vast subject as much as possible, I will speak of Italy alone; of that Italy which then, as now, was the object of the most audacious attacks and the theatre of the most instructive resistance. I will first tell what was the condition of the "Christian republic" at the end of the twelfth century. Then I will show the radiant transformation of society in the thirteenth century while determining its general causes, and finish by comparing this heroic age with our own.
I.
For most of Belgium, the history of civilization commences only with the day when General Dumouriez "brought them liberty at the point of the bayonet." Before the French revolution, it was the common error that the era of political and religious revolution only opened with the sixteenth century, and such error is common to-day. Yet Gnosticism, Manicheism, Arianism, and Greek schism have produced in Christian Europe commotions much greater and more fatal than those of which the predictions of Martin Luther have been the occasion, and of which the Protestant princes have so abundantly reaped the fruits. From the tenth to the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church suffered on the part of the state—of the empire, as they then termed it—assaults in comparison to which the thirty years' war and the revolutions fomented by the statolatres of the thirteenth century were only children's play.
Never was the spirit of sectarianism more active than in the twelfth century. The disguised partisans of Gnosticism, Manicheism, or Arianism, these habitual forms of antichristianism, were spread all over civilized Europe under the most diverse names: Cathares, Pauliciens, Petrobrusiens, Tanchelmites, Henriciens, Bogomiles, Apostoliques, Endistes, Arnoldistes, Circonsis, Passagieres, Publicains, Vaudois Bons Hommes, etc., etc. These names appear strange, but they are not more so than their actual partisans: socialists, free-thinkers, solid men, Fourierists, Saint Simoniens, etc.
And do not suppose that these sects, or these schools, as they are called nowadays, confined themselves to the innocent publication of their programme, and simply distributed a few partisans through anonymous societies, among the councils of administration, or in the senates of empires.
The Ambrosien church was during a certain time directed by the Nicolite priests of Milan, and supported violently by the emperor and by the government. Our compatriot, Dankelm, a deist a little sore, who preached against the corruptions of the monks, their artifices, the tithes and mortmain, was head of an organized church at Bruges, and also at Anvers. If the Vaudois had, like Luther, obtained the support of the corrupted and sensual bishops, and the ambitious princes so powerful and rapacious, their church would have taken root in a great part of Europe during the twelfth century; it has endured longer than will any Protestant church; for it still existed in the last century, and I believe there are still some communities in Holland and Suabia.
All these sects agreed on one point, their hatred of the Church of Rome. M. Renan, in his last book, Questions Contemporains, writing with a haughty moderation almost disdainful, feared for the Catholic Church of the nineteenth century a grand schism resulting in the simultaneous election of two popes. Such an apprehension denotes in this writer a defect of memory or a strange want of perspicacity; for in the church, anti-popes were counted by dozens, and in the twelfth century, this kind of schism appeared several times. The competitors or anti-popes of Calixtus II., (1119-1124,) of Innocent II., (1130-1143,) and of Alexander III., (1159-1181,) were sustained by emperors whose material power had but little weight in the then known world. Under Innocent II., the schism lasted only eight years. Sixty years later, Innocent III. governed Europe.
Heresies and schisms are always accompanied by social revolutions. However, the irreligious antagonism of capital and labor, which is one of the causes of modern socialism, did not exist in the twelfth century under the learned and redoubtable form of our day. The reason is a simple one, and we should be proud of our age: labor, of which Christianity has made a duty, had not then in political society the great and legitimate importance it has now. The problem of pauperism had never been solved politically except in densely populated countries, and in the twelfth century the population of Europe was relatively less considerable. Hatred of capital only manifested itself among the idle, among certain sects, (the Cathares, the Frerots, the Apostoliques, the Begghards, the Lollards, etc.,) and particularly in "the wars of the castle and the hut;" violent wars which were not only carried on by poor devils hardened by passions, but by the châtelains, (governors or keepers,) thieves only distinguishable from the others by new titles given them through euphemism. This category of men was then more numerous than in our time. We respect a mill, but we steal a province. Then they took the province and the mill also.
Great luxury existed in all the towns of Italy. Money was a courted power. The bankers' families became the source of dynasties.
A portion of the secular clergy lived in the relaxation of discipline, and even morals. Neither the energy of the great Hildebrand, nor the activity of the admirable Alexander III., the friend of the Lombard communities, had been powerful enough to completely reform the regular clergy. Neither in the fifteenth nor in the eighteenth century were more scandals seen than those which disheartened the great St. Bernard. "Oh! for the power to see again, before my death," wrote he to the pope, Eugene III., "those happy days of the church when the apostles cast their nets for souls, and not for gold." This Pope Eugene was not permitted to die at Rome. The Eternal City was in the hands of the Garibaldians of the time, the Mazzini of whom was named Arnold, a clerk of Brescia, of austere manners and quick-witted oratory. After having studied philosophy in Paris under the cold and licentious Abelard, Arnold commenced to traverse the Lombard cities. Imposing upon himself a mission altogether political, he pretended not to wish to injure the Catholic faith.
"Detractor of clergymen and bishops, persecutor of monks, he reserved," said a chronicler of the time, "all his flattery for the laity. He sustained the theory of no salvation for clergymen possessing lands, for bishops disposing of regal rights, or monks owning valuables; that all these things belonged to the state, and it alone should dispose of them in favor of the laity. It is said also that he did not reason sanely on the eucharist and the baptism of infants." His partisans, called politicians, called him to Rome, where he had resolved to establish a new government. Forced to fly from this city after the second council of Lateran, he wandered for several years in France, in Germany, and in Switzerland, promulgating everywhere the doctrines which he applied to his Italian friends. During an insurrection, the pope, Lucius II., was killed by a blow from a stone, (to-day they only kill ministers,) and his successor, Eugene III., took refuge in Viterbo, and afterward in France. Arnold was in Switzerland with 2000 soldiers collected there; the multitude having granted him the dictatorship, he proclaimed the fall of the temporal power of the popes, and the re-establishment of the Roman republic; then, carried away by the logic of his ideas rather than by his situation, he called to Rome the emperor, the monarch of Italy, in order that he would deign to restore to the empire the lustre it had under Justinian. Demagogues naturally advocate Caesarism.
The emperors rushed to Rome. Arnold and his government were thrown into the Tiber. Then recommenced, under a new form, the quarrel between the priesthood and the empire, existing still in Europe. Never had the pride of the depositaries of the civil power, the absolutism of the god state, and the tyranny of the supreme authority, representatives more complete, and in certain respects more sympathetic, than the emperors of the house of Hohenstaufen. How many laws vaunted by certain schools of our day of progress have been dressed in the signature of these fierce Sonabes, then abrogated as despotic and contrary to the liberty and dignity of citizens.
The Staufen were fanatics in law when it was a question of their authority. Frederic I. had for his witnesses the four famous doctors of Bologna, who, with Irnerius, their professor, were masters of the study of modern law. It was these four doctors who, by the aid of texts and juridical interpretations, were ready to impose on the Lombard cities represented at the diet of Roncaglia the chains which the entire material power of the German emperors had never been able to forge. It was the chancellor of Frederic II., Pierre Des Vignes, who is the author of the Recueil des Lois de Sidle, the first code of despotism of modern times.
In few words, then, we have here the state of Europe, in its most civilized centre, in the second half of the twelfth century. The truth was at once attacked in church and state, with the view of corrupting both; in the church, with an aim at her authority; in the state, to banish liberty.
II.
It is the glory of the epoch which begins with the Lombard League and the pontificate of the English Mendicant, Adrian IV., to have re-established a moral equilibrium in Christian society, and to have saved Europe from a lethargy similar to that in which a Caesaro-papacy has plunged the East.
That which distinguished the civilizing genius of this epoch was a moral vigor, a consequence of the intimate union existing between the citizen and the Christian, between the scholar and the theologian; I say union, not confusion. In the Cid of Guillaume de Castro, from which P. Corneille has borrowed largely, there is a scene in which the hero seated at table exhorts his companions to render homage to the patron of Spain, "a chevalier himself, and with a large rosary suspended to his sword." A leper enters and asks charity. The warriors take flight. Alone the Cid remains, and forces him to sit on his cloak and eat with him from his own plate. The repast finished, the mendicant blessed the Cid, and betrays himself as Lazarus, who has come to reveal his future destiny. The sword, which for the chevalier is the sign of the citizen, serves to sustain the rosary, the emblem of the Christian.
In the Traité de l'Office du Podestà, extract of Book III. of the Tresor of Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, we find in old French the exposition of the public law as understood by the communicants of that time. The podesta of our time could learn from it much that is useful and necessary to know. This, for example, is the beginning of the chapter where the author treats of things "that gentlemen should know and teach to those over whom they are placed":
"Remember then, thou who governest a city, from whence comes the power to possess thy seignory. Remember thou the law and the commandments, and never forget God and his saints, but often approach the altar and pray God for thee and thy subjects; for David and the prophets say, 'God guardeth the city and every thing that laboreth within it.' Honor the pastor of pastors of the holy Church; for God says, 'He who receiveth thee receiveth me.' Be religious, and evidence the true faith; for nothing is more beautiful to the prince of the earth than true faith and right belief: for it is written, 'When the just king is on his throne, no harm can befall him.' Guard the churches, the houses of God, take care of widowed women and orphans; for it is written, 'Be defenders of orphans and widows.' Defend the poor against the wickedness of power; for thou hast in thy care the great, the small, and the mean. Such things become thee from the beginning, etc."
Have you observed the character of the figures seen on the tombs of this period? The dead are lying on their backs, with hands clasped; they do not bear the impress of death; they seem to sleep and await the resurrection. Their attitude is simple, naturally humble, but at the same time naturally proud. They are armed; it is understood that they have fought the battle of life, and in passing to the other shore have vanquished the enemy of the human race with the arms of prayer. The citizen and the Christian are so blended that it is impossible to distinguish them; and this harmonious whole presents an appearance at once humble and martial, tender and manly, which fills one with respect without imposing fear.
Such is the character of the epoch I would depict while portraying the causes of its grandeur. Let it be remarked, however, I do not seek to make an apology for the thirteenth century or the middle ages. My ideal is in the future, not in the past. But the past being the mirror of the future, I love to regard in the thirteenth century the memorable examples of what could be done by the citizen under the influence of Christian faith and reason in the midst of a society agitated and upset by heresy, schism, socialism, the power of demagogues, and Caesarism.
I suppose that the son of a rich merchant of Anvers, transported by that enthusiasm for good which is the fruit of a grace divine, renounces suddenly the luxury of a paternal home, and a dissipated and idle life, which is too often the consequence of a bad education, pampered by fortune. After having trained his soul by fasting and prayer, and the contemplation of the divine attributes toward the supernatural regions of life, he robes himself voluntarily as a poor man and traverses the industrial centres of the country, communicating to his equals the ardent faith which escapes from his mouth in luminous characters. At Gand, at Charleroi, at Liege, some young men become his followers, and between them form an association for the service of the humble, the weak, the poor, the miserable. Their mission is to go about in the dress of workmen, living as they do, and preaching from the steps of buildings, at the cross-roads, and in the fields. To the rich, the obligation of working for and befriending the poor; to the poor, the duties of sufferance and respect; to all the world, the love of God and the church which he has made the depositary of his graces. What might not be accomplished by such missionaries of love, labor, science, and peace? What would not be their influence and their authority?
Again, let me suppose the son of a rich English lord renouncing the ostentation, the privileges and errors of his family and religion, and, seized with an irresistible love for his neighbor and humanity, seeking his old friends of Eton and Oxford, communicating to them the flame of his convictions, and then proposing to them to travel through England, Europe, the world, and propagate Christianity; arguing everywhere with the adversaries of the church; in the universities, in the public-houses, before the door of the palace, or in the junk-shops and the huts; preaching justice to the English, to the Irish respect for the laws, to all the world peace, science, liberty; opening here a school, there a hospital, and drawing after him his contemporaries, by the authority of faith, the power of science, the contagion of devotion. If you can imagine the results obtained by the O'Connells, the Fathers Mathews, and the Newmans, you will form a feeble idea of a revolution that could produce a phalanx of men of such vigorous temperament.
This son of the wealthy merchant, and this child of an illustrious house, existed in the beginning of the thirteenth century. "The one," said Dante, "was surrounded by all the éclat of the seraphim, and the other walked in wisdom and sanctity in the splendor of the cherubim."
The history of the life and works of these two extraordinary men contains most precious teachings, the deep import of which often escapes us, because given to us in such a common way, without explaining their actual life. This seraphim (Saint Francis) and this cherubim (Saint Dominic) governed the entire thirteenth century by the extraordinary movement they impressed on souls, and by the moral conquests, political, scientific, literary, and artistic, with which their disciples enriched humanity.
The Mendicant friars, as they were later called, were not only cloistered religious, giving themselves solely to a contemplative life, and only leaving their convents for the church; they were citizens in every acceptation of the word, but vowed to no ambitions, mingling with their contemporaries, living in the forum, and mounting the tribune of the popular assemblies as well as the pulpits of the universities. When this tribune or pulpit was forbidden them, they improvised one of their own, and made appeals to the people who wished to hear the well-known voices, simple, disinterested, loving, and therefore eloquent.
Thus the Franciscans penetrated even into China, "on the horse of St. Francis"—that is, on foot—and traversing, wonderful as it may appear, the whole continent of Asia. They founded a Christian colony at Pekin, where the ships of France and England could only enter with noise of cannon—a result assuredly more imposing but not half so certain. During the Renaissance, when the first Holland vessels arrived at Greenland, they found there a convent of Dominicans.
In the thirteenth century, there were, even in civilized Europe, more Chinese and Laplanders than would be supposed. To convert them, the Franciscans and Dominicans applied themselves assiduously, vanquishing them by science, and convincing them by charity.
I understand the word science in its old acceptation; a deep rational research into the first principles of things and the origin of our knowledge. At no epoch of history, I dare to say, has this research been carried on by more passionate lovers, by more powerful intelligences, by more magnanimous hearts, than the Mendicant monks of the thirteenth century. To prove this, let me only mention four names.
The first in date is the Count de Bollstaedt, first Bishop of Ratisbon, then Dominican; a professor of Cologne, and a perfect encyclopedia; his gigantic works replete with all the ideas of his time, and the initiator of German learning.
This scientific knowledge was only surpassed by that of his pupil and companion, the Count d'Aquin, descendant of Staufen on his mother's side, and called by his comrades "the ox of Sicily," by the learned world "the angel of the schools," and by the church Saint Thomas. His principal theological work (Summa Totius Theologiae Tripartita) remained unfinished with the grand cathedrals of the middle ages; but what we know of this and the other works of this prodigious man will suffice to place him in the rank of the greatest geniuses that have appeared on the earth.
However he himself emulated in science the genius of his friend, the seraphic doctor, Jean de Fidanza, of Tuscany, professor in the University of Paris, an admirable man, of whom his master, the English Franciscan, Alexander Hales, said: "Verus Israelita in quo Adam non peccasse videtur." When they brought him the cardinal's hat, Saint Bonaventura was occupied in placing the plates on the table of his convent. He died at the general council at Lyons, (1274,) just at the moment when he was endeavoring to reunite the Greek to the Roman Church.
The fourth of these great doctors, who truly indoctrinated science, is the great English Franciscan, the admirable doctor, Roger Bacon, philologist and naturalist, who predicted steam navigation and railroads. He is also supposed to have invented the telescope, and foreseen the discovery of America. The Protestants of the sixteenth century, who pretended to shed light on the world, unfortunately burnt the convent that held the manuscripts of this precursor of natural science.
A French writer, who does himself honor in protecting the church with his valiant pen as others have done with their swords, M. L. Veuillot, and of whom it may be said, "brave as his pen," says somewhere that the thirteenth century has produced such great things in the moral order that Saint Thomas had been able to build up the colossus styled La Somme; yet during this epoch people went on foot, and time was not lost running over the world on railroads. I am persuaded the contemporaries of Roger Bacon would not have approved of this apologetic argument; for if they had known the great discoveries of our day, of what works would not such vigorous and universal minds have been capable? If such men, consumed by activity, by love of science and humanity, ran from Naples to Oxford, from Bologna to Paris, professing, preaching, writing, administering the sacraments, directing their communities, or working with the pope and the bishops in the government of the church; if such men have produced such great things on foot, what would they not have undertaken with railroads at their disposal? To-day there come from Italy but few philosophers measurable with the Count d'Aquin and Jean de Fidanza; but, to make amends, how easy to convoke an oecumenical council and send zouaves to Rome!
The observation I have just made is not a digression, for it tends to demonstrate the profoundly practical aim of science in the thirteenth century. These professors of Paris, Cologne, and Oxford did not content themselves with teaching their doctrines from the privileged benches of a university to a few cultivated, delicate, and critical minds. They did not style themselves philosophers, as the wise men by profession, who in the last century wished thus to distinguish Christians. They practised their doctrines, and their teaching was democratic, (pardon the so much abused expression,) not only on account of their principles but in regard to the public whom they addressed. They called all the world to the feet of their pulpits, and after distributing the bread of faith and science, that of charity was not wanting. "Thus," said Ozanam, "the poor knew and blessed their names. And even to-day, after six hundred years, the inhabitants of Paris bend the knee before the altars of "the angel of the schools," and the workmen of Lyons are honored in carrying once a year, on their robust shoulders, the triumphant remains of the "seraphic doctor." [Footnote 133] Can we believe that six centuries hence they will do the same for the ashes of Kant, Fichte, or Hegel?
[Footnote 133: Dante et la Philosophie Catholique, p. i. ch. ii. p. 88.]
This enthusiasm of holy people for science was not entirely the fruit of the doctrines of St. Francis and St. Dominic, or of the personal tendencies of their disciples. When the zeal for such subjects weakened, the church tried to revive the flame. Let us recall the bull of 1254, published by Innocent IV., for the re-establishment of philosophical studies: "A deplorable rumor, spread abroad and repeated from mouth to mouth, has reached our ears, and deeply afflicts us. It is said that the many aspirants for the priesthood, abandoning, repudiating even, philosophical studies, and consequently the teachings of theology, have sought the different schools to explain the civil laws. Sarah then is the slave, and Hagar has become mistress. We have tried to find a remedy for this unexpected disorder. We would bring back minds to the study of theology, which is the science of salvation, or at least to philosophical studies, in which it is true the tenderest emotions of piety are not met with, but where the soul discovers the first lights of eternal truth, and frees itself from the miserable preoccupations of cupidity—the root of all evil, and a species of idolatry. Therefore we decide by these presents, that in future no professor of jurisprudence, no lawyer, whatever may be his rank or the renown he may enjoy in the practice of law, can pretend to any prebend, honor, or ecclesiastical dignity, nor even to an inferior benefice, if he has not given proofs of requisite capacity in the faculty of arts, and if he is not recommended by the innocence of his life and the purity of his manners."
Such admirable teaching could not remain barren in a Christian society. In 1256, just as Pope Alexander IV. had declared all the serfs emancipated who would abandon the cause of Ezelin le Féroce, the authorities of Bologna proceeded to the general enfranchisement of those of their territory. The city was not contented to set free only its own serfs; it extended the benefit to those belonging to private masters, indemnifying the proprietors, as some modern states have done in the slavery of the blacks: the middle age was distinguished always for its respect for acquired rights. The state paid ten livres for every serf over fourteen, eight livres for those below that age. The freedmen were bound to pay to the state some moderate tax in cereals. The suggester of this generous measure was Bonacursio de Sorresina, capitano del popolo, elected podesta the following year. He placed the names of all the enfranchised on a register called the Paradise of Joy. "An all-powerful God," said he in the introduction to this register, "created man free; original sin poisoned him; from immortal he became mortal, from incorruptible corruptible, from free the slave of hell. He sent for man's redemption his only Son, begotten by him from all eternity. It is then just and equitable that man saved and freed by God should not stagnate in servitude, where human laws have precipitated him; that he should be set free. By these considerations, Bologna, which has always fought for public liberty, which recalls the past and weighs the future, has for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ redeemed all the serfs of its territory, and proclaimed, for the future, slavery will be no more tolerated. A little leaven leavens the whole lump; the presence of one degraded being dishonors society."
It is right to observe that this noble language is the reproduction, often textual, of the well-known words of the holy Pope Gregory I., the Great, against the slavery of the Anglo-Saxons.
Ten years afterward Bela, king of Hungary, having rejected a bishop because he was born a serf, the pope wrote him that "the will of man could not prescribe against nature, that has given liberty to the human race."
"It is a frequent error among men," said the Count d'Aquin, "to believe themselves noble because they are the issue of noble families. … It is well not to have failed in examples of noble ancestors; but it is far better to have adorned an humble birth with great actions. … I repeat, then, with Saint Jerome, that nothing appears to me worth envying in this pretended hereditary nobility, if the nobles themselves are not restrained in the paths of virtue by the shame of derogating from it. The true nobility is that of the soul, according to the words of the poet:
'Nobilitas sola est animum quae moribus ornat.'" [Footnote 134]
[Footnote 134: De Eruditione Principum.]
A disciple of this great master, the B. Egide Colonna, cardinal archbishop of Bourges, wrote in his book, De Regimine Principum: "Society cannot attain to the supreme end assigned it without a combination of three means—virtue, light, and exterior well-being. A prince should, then, in his kingdom first watch with wise solicitude over the culture of letters, in order to multiply the number of the learned and skilful.
[Footnote 135 (no reference; probably De Regimine Principum): Liv. iii. p. 2, c. viii.]
For where science flourishes, and the sources of study spring up, sooner or later instruction is disseminated among the crowd. So, to dissipate the shadows of ignorance which shamefully envelop the face of royalty, the king should encourage letters by a favorable attention. Still more, if he refuses the necessary encouragement, and does not wish his subjects instructed, he ceases to be a king—he becomes a tyrant."
To finish the picture of the ideas of this time, let us quote again these words of a sermon of the gentle and seraphic Bonaventura: "We find today great scandals in governments; for while an inexperienced pilot would not be placed on a ship to manage the rudder, we put at the head of nations those who ignore the art of governing them. When the right of succession places children on a throne, woe to empires!"
The doctrines of the thirteenth century on the formation of public power, on the duties of supreme authority, on the rights of people, on sedition, etc., are so rigorous that they appear bold, even in our time, when the defect is not precisely an excess of reserve and respect. Truth alone can free the human mind from every prejudice, develop character, and inspire a language at once so proud and so simple. What reflections it provokes when one has listened to the magnificent platitudes of so many men of our time, who believe they think freely because they are not Christians.
When Innocent IV., Celestin IV., St. Thomas, the B. Egide Colonna, and St. Bonaventura spoke thus, the Caesarism of the middle ages was decidedly vanquished for several centuries. This is one of the grandest facts of history since the incarnation of the Word.
The emperors of the house of Swabia, assuming with greater power and more science the despotic plans of the Saxon emperors, had the monstrous pretension to realize to the letter these texts of The Digest: "The will of the prince is law," (Ulp.;) "The prince is above all laws," (Paul.) By virtue of these texts the prince commanding would have been the absolute sovereign of the world, the proprietor of the Christian universe, and not only of the royalties of the earth, but also of private property. Interpreters taught without blushing the Caesarian theory of the dominium mundi. Le Recueil des Lois of Sicily, revised by Pierre de Vigne for Frederic II., and promulgated by this autocrat in the kingdom of Naples, is a model of this abominable legislation that progressists of our day sometimes dream of restoring.
The Roman Church alone resisted these false principles, these monstrous politics, and, thanks be to God, she triumphed.
The ruler of modern times has become what he was in the age of pretorian law, corrupted by the Caesarian jurors of the empire, of the middle ages, and particularly the Renaissance, that is to say, the people, who by a so-called "royal law" would have relinquished their rights into the hands of the Roman emperors. But if the sovereign people could not but be a majority purely numerical, arrogating in its turn the pretended laws of Caesar, the struggles of the middle age between the clergy and the empire would certainly be renewed.
This indissoluble alliance between Christian truth and civil liberty is one of the most striking facts to those who study history without prejudice; one of the best apologetic arguments I know. In the east, Caesarism has only been able to succeed through the corruption of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and through schism; and we know only too well what has become of the countries where Homer sang, where Plato wrote, and where Saint Gregory of Nazianzen and St. Basil preached. Europe has had to suffer frequently from an excess of power in individuals in the church; but they must not be confounded with the church itself, which has introduced into the world the distinction of two powers: this salutary distinction was not known of old, and is only menaced in our day by rationalism in the state.
The people have understood this august rôle of the church, and do not cease to invoke with the poet: "Hail, mighty parent." In the midst of ruin accumulated by the ambition of princes, the corruption of governments, human passions, or time that has no respect for truth, there remains today nothing but the good old pope, and young nations ask the benediction of the aged man. In modern democracies there will soon exist but one historical institution, the papacy. The old religions of paganism have left us but cold and gigantic pyramids of stone inclosing the ashes of their priests. Christianity, on the contrary, has transmitted us the living stone of the church, which will outlive the dust of ages.
In all these struggles against heresies, schism, materialism, Caesarism, the Roman Church had from the tenth to the thirteenth century its allies, the communes, who were the masses of those days. Civil liberty was, so to say, the fruit of the preachings of the church. It was from this epoch we date the Mass against tyrants, which can be found in the old missals. It was at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, under the pontificates of Alexander III. and Innocent III., two of the noblest successors of St. Peter, that this alliance, so natural, so necessary, between the church that represents the human conscience, and the communes who represent the liberty and independence of the citizen, produced the most happy and considerable results. In 1183 was signed the peace of Constance, which assured definitively the liberty of the Lombard people. In the final clause of the petition of the citizens of Plaisance, the preliminary of this celebrated peace, the deputies of the Lombard League had expressly stipulated "that it would be permitted to the cities of the society to remain always in unity with the church." The great charter of the liberties of England dates from 1215. At the head of the signatures of this memorable act for the English people is found, for the church and for liberty, a disciple of the pope, the learned Cardinal Stephen Langton, whose statue has recently been introduced into Westminster Palace, where it will be a significant witness of the past, and of the salutary breath which is passing to-day over old England. And not only in England, but in Spain and Hungary, had the church surrounded the cradle of modern representative rule with its maternal cares, by its celebrated "Golden Bull" establishing the law of peoples and communities on the basis which to-day it enjoys in this apostolical kingdom.
But in the Italian cities particularly is best observed the fecundity of this salutary alliance between the sentiments of the citizen and those of the Christian.
I have spoken of the scientific and religious rôle of the Mendicant friars; it would be better to call them citizen-monks. At Bologna, it was one of them who fulfilled the function of inspector-general to the people. Ezelin le Féroce, tyrant of the marshes of Verona, and the terror of the Lombard cities, was only afraid of the Franciscans, especially Saint Antony of Padua.
After ten years of penitence, Saint Francis, having prayed and watched for forty nights, ordered Brother Leonard to take a pen and write what he should dictate; and this angelic man, entranced by the ravishments of divine love, improvised the following beautiful canticle:
"Most high, most powerful and gracious
Lord, to thee belong praise, glory, and
every blessing. All is due to thee; and
thy creatures are not worthy so much as to
call thy name.
"Praised be God my Lord for all creatures,
and for our brother the sun, who gives
us the day and the light. Beautiful and
radiating in all his splendor, he does homage
to thee, O my God!
"And praised be thou, my Lord, for our
sister the moon, and for the stars. Thou
hast formed them in the heavens, clear and
beautiful.
"Praised be thou, my God, for my brother
the wind, for the air and the clouds, and for
good and bad weather, whatever it may be!
for by these thou sustainest thy creatures.
"Praised be my Lord for our sister the
water, which is so useful, humble, precious,
and chaste.
"Praised be thou, my God, for our brother
the fire! By him, thou illuminest the night;
beautiful and pleasant to see, untamable
and strong.
"Praised be my God for our mother the
earth, which sustains us, nourishes us, and
produces every sort of fruit, of various flowers,
and herbs!"
A few days after this admirable scene, there occurred between the Bishop of Assisi and the magistrates of the people one of those quarrels so frequent in the Italian cities of the thirteenth century. Saint Francis, distressed at such discord, added to his canticle the following verse:
"Praised be thou, my Lord, for those who forgive for the love of thee, and who patiently bear infirmity and tribulation. Happy those who persevere in peace; for it is the Most High who will crown them at last."
Then he ordered the minor brothers to hasten to the magistrates and go with them to the bishop, before whom they were to chant the new verse of the canticle of the sun. The adversaries present could not resist the chanting of the mineurs, and they were reconciled.
Since I have mentioned the canticle of the sun, one of the models of Franciscan poetry of this age, I cannot forego the pleasure of relating the end of it. After the pacification of Assisi, Saint Francis, who suffered terribly from his stigmata, had gone, to recruit his health, to Foligno, where it was revealed to him he would die in two years. He then composed the last verse:
"Be praised, my God, for our sister, corporal death, from which no man living may escape! Woe to him who dies in mortal sin! Happy he who at the hour of death is found conformable to thy most holy will! for death cannot injure him.
"Praise and bless my God, render him thanks, and serve him with great humility."
The spirit of party had become truly a moral malady in the Italian cities of the thirteenth century. If among my readers there are those who abuse their own time because the spirit of party condemns them to the struggle, I will tell them that in Italy, in the time of Saint Francis and Saint Louis, they saluted each other "in Ghibelline style" and cut their bread "à la Guelph," and for a trifle parties attacked each other in the cross-streets and in the public places. We have certainly progressed since then.
In 1233, the nobles and the people of Plaisance were in open warfare; the Franciscan Leon, selected as arbiter, published a law, and divided equally all the employments of state between the two inimical factions; he exacted, besides, a confirmation of the sentence through the kiss of peace. In the same year the brother Gerard, of the same order, reconciled the parties at Modena. At Parma, he reformed the statutes of the people and recalled the proscriptions. In 1257, the Dominican Eberhard caused to be set at liberty the Guelphs imprisoned at Brescia. One of his companions had the same success at Parma. But the most interesting example of the powerful influence of religion on civil life was the mission of the brother John of Vicenza, in the Lombard towns.
Inspired by an apostolic zeal, the aged Pope Gregory IX. charged the Dominican, John of Vicenza, (Fra Giovanni Chio,) to go preach peace to the inimical factions, and re-establish everywhere among the people union and concord. Brother John, endowed with winning eloquence, commenced his mission at Bologna. He obtained immense and unhoped-for success in the city where Saint Francis and Saint Anthony had already achieved extraordinary triumphs; nobles and people, professors and students, all laid down their enmities at the feet of the brother preacher; the magistrates handed him the statutes of the people, in order that he might correct all that could give rise to new discussions. The Paduans, informed that he was coming to them, went to meet him, preceded by their magistrates and the carroccio, to Monselice, four or five miles from the city; Brother John, seated on the patriotic car, made a triumphal entry among the people; the success in Padua surpassed that of Bologna; the people assembled at the Place de la Valle, applauded him with joy, and begged him to reform the statutes. The same triumphs at Trevise, Feltre, Belluna, and Vicenza. At Verona, Ezelin and the Montecchi promised him under oath to do everything the pope might order. The eloquent monk again visited such places as Camino, Conegliano, Saint Boniface, Mantua, Brescia, preaching everywhere universal peace, reconciling factions, and setting prisoners at liberty. At last, he appointed the 28th of August, the feast of Saint Augustine, for a general assembly to be held on the plain of Pacquara, on the borders of the Adige, about three miles from Verona. On the day determined, the entire populations of Verona, Mantua, Brescia, Padua, Vicenza, with their magistrates and carroccio, arrived at the appointed place; a multitude of people from Trevise, Feltre, Venice, Ferrara, Modena, Reggio, Parma, Bologna, and most of them barefooted in sign of penitence; the bishops of Verona, Brescia, Mantua, Bologna, Modena, Reggio, Trevise, Vicenza, and Padua; the patriarch of Aquila; the margrave of Este, Ezelin and Alberic de Romano, the Signers de Camino, and all of Venetia. Parisio de Cereta, a contemporary author, in his Veronese chronicle, enumerates his auditory at four hundred thousand persons. The Dominican took for his text: "My peace I give to you, my peace I leave to you." Never had Christians witnessed a more august spectacle. The enthusiasm was carried even to excess. It was a delirium of peace and union. Brother John ordained, in the name of God and the church, a general pacification, and devoted those who infringed upon it to excommunication and eternal malediction. He proposed the marriage of Renaud, son of the margrave of Este, with Adelaide, daughter of Alberic of Romano, and obtained also from the brothers Romano the promise they would sell to the town of Padua for fifteen hundred livres the possessions they had in the territory of this city. The act embraced divers clauses, and contained promises of pacification.
Sixty years after the assassination of Pope Lucius II. by the Arnoldites, the spiritual power of the papacy was, so to say, omnipotent in Italy, if not in the whole of Europe. And it is precisely about this epoch that in proportion as the civil power of the Roman Church determined, limited, and fortified itself, in Italy the ecclesiastical principalities were extinguished; while for centuries they have been maintained in other countries, less submissive to the Holy See. This fact will not astonish us, if we follow with attention the progression of ideas propagated by Christianity, and taking such deep root in the thirteenth century.
Thus the sap of Christianity mounts in all the branches of this immense tree called humanity, and produces abundant fruit. The Gothic art is displayed while developing the Roman; the ogive comes out from the arch by a natural elevation toward the summit or the roof. Elliptical forms, wiser and more perfect than circular ones, (the circle is an ellipsis in which the focuses are blended,) transform the architecture, and give to the monuments an apparent flight to heaven, just as the study of the ellipsis in analytical geometry conducts to the infinite. The austere energy of St. Bernard had no time for art. He needed the science of Roger Bacon and the poetry of St. Francis. The Roman basilica gives place to the Gothic cathedral, and throws its gracious shadows on the mansions of the neighboring town. The whole of Europe is covered with a vegetation of admirable monuments, epic poems of stone—as the church of Assisi, the cathedral of Florence, the cathedral of Cologne—poetry of the highest order, not for rich idlers, or delicate minds, but for the people en masse. Art agrees with the epoch of which it is the emanation—it is for the people themselves. "The more I see of these Gothic monuments," wrote M. David, (d' Angers,) "the more I experience the happiness of reading these beautiful religious pages so piously sculptured on the secular walls of the churches. They were the archives of an ignorant people; it was therefore necessary the handwriting should be legible. The saints sculptured in Gothic art have an expression of serenity and calmness, full of confidence and faith. This evening, as I write, the setting sun gilds the façade of the cathedral of Amiens: the calm faces of the saints in stone diffuse a radiant light."
Mysterious power of truth! M. David was attracted to it by art; M. Pugin was converted, it is said, by studying the cathedral of York. In truth, there are few languages more perfect than that of the symbolism, so deep and complete, of the thirteenth century. "The men of the middle age," said one whose works and remembrances are very dear to me—"the men of the middle age were not satisfied to simply raise stone upon stone; these stones were to speak, and speak a language of painting, equally understood by rich and poor; heaven itself must be visible, and the angels and saints remain present by their images, to console and preach to the people. The vaults of the two basilicas of Assisi were covered with a field of blue, strewn with stars of gold. On the walls were displayed the mysteries of the two Testaments, and the life of St. Francis formed the sequel to the book of divine revelations. But, as if it were impossible to approach with impunity the miraculous tomb, the painters who ornamented in fresco seemed inspired with a new spirit; they conceived an ideal more pure, more animated, than the old Byzantine types which had had their day, but which for eight hundred years had continued to degenerate. The basilica of Assisi became the cradle of a renaissance in art, and evidenced its progress. There Guido of Sienna and Giunta of Pisa detached themselves more and more from the Greek masters whose aridity they softened and whose immobility they shattered. Then came Cimabue. He represented all the sacred writings in a series of paintings which decorated the principal part of the church, and which time has mutilated. But six hundred years have not tarnished the splendor of the heads of Christ, of the Virgin, and of St. John, painted at the top of the vaults; nor the images of the four great doctors, where a Byzantine majesty still carries with it an air of life and immortal youth. At last Giotto appeared, and one of his works was the triumph of St. Francis, painted in four compartments under the vault which crowns the altar of the chapel. Nothing is more celebrated than these beautiful frescoes; but I know nothing more touching than one in which is figured the betrothal of the servant of God to holy poverty. Poverty, under the appearance of a lady perfectly beautiful, but the face attenuated, the clothing torn; a dog barks at her, two children throw stones at her, and put thorns in her way. She, however, calm and joyous, holds out her hand to St. Francis; Christ himself unites the two spouses; and in the midst of clouds appears the Eternal Father accompanied by angels, as if too much of heaven and earth could not be given to assist at the wedding of these two mendicants. Here, nothing suggests the painting of the Grecian school; all is new, free, and inspired. Progress did not cease with the disciples of Giotto appointed to continue his work: Cavalini, Taddeo Gaddi, Puccio Capana. In the midst of the variety of their compositions, we recognize the unity of the faith shed so lustrously through their works. When one pauses before these chaste representations of the Virgin, the Annunciation, the Nativity, before the crucified Christ, with the saddened angels weeping around the cross, or collecting in cups the divine blood, it would require a very hardened heart not to feel the tears flow, and not to bend the humbled knee and strike the breast with the shepherds and poor women who pray at the feet of such images."
And this is the art of the thirteenth century; it caused to weep under the same vault, and caused to pray on the same slab with poor peasants, one of the purest-minded intelligences, one of the noblest hearts of our time, one that the thirteenth century would have styled "the seraphic Ozanam."
And let us again remark this attraction, at once logical and living with facts produced by the germination of Christian thought in civil society. St. Francis and St. Dominic no longer preach as the disciples of St. Benedict to the few members of a military oligarchy, or to a flock of serfs; they address themselves to a civilized society, living in the midst of the benefits of Christianity, without having to give an account of the origin of these benefits; in the midst of a society aggrandized by the progress of Christian equality, and still desirous of enlargement. There is no longer a fierce Licambre, but haughty jurists. No more cruel Anglo-Saxons, but emperors, elegant, educated, poetical, seductive, who hide their despotic projects under titles the most pompous and the most fallacious. No more pagan kings martyrizing the Christian; but Catholic kings more or less sincere, who, in the name of social and state interests, seek to torture consciences. There are no more lords whose brutality scandalizes the coarsest minds; but there are rich citizens, softened and blinded by selfishness, who weary under the Christian yoke, and who hide their sensualism under the interest they profess for Caesar or the prince. It is, then, from the time of St. Francis the chanter of poverty, from the time of St. Dominic the descendant of the Guzman, of the race of Cid, that is born in Italy, by the side of the citizens, a new class which completes the political emancipation of the Christian people. After having grown up, the people disappeared under the Renaissance when Protestantism triumphed, not to appear again until modern times, in our own age, when the sap of Christianity forces the church to remount into the branches of the tree of which I spoke. Art has resented this moral revolution of the thirteenth century, and literature also. The grand writer whom I have already quoted, I was going to say the poet who has founded the society of St. Vincent de Paul, makes somewhere a reflection which has struck me forcibly. Have you remarked, with him, that the church has put poetry into the choir, while she has banished reasoning into the pulpit—into the grand nave? I do not say reason, for true poetry is the chant of reason. Poetry that I call real and practical, that which elevates the soul toward its end, which balances the sighs of humanity, and clothes itself in spoken or written form, rhythmical or not, the sentiment which attracts us toward the infinite, and which St. Francis designates love, such poetry is simply prayer. A poet is naturally sacerdotal. He is really the vates of antiquity. David and Solomon prayed with lyre in hand, and their prayers became the hymns of Christianity. Isaiah chanted the coming of the Messiah.
So in the thirteenth century, poetry was everywhere, a consequence of the Christian sentiment, spread in every direction through the moral life. To Innocent III., who under the name of the Count de Signa was considered one of the most learned men of his time, is attributed the Dies Ire. He has composed other spiritual songs. St. Thomas has left us the Pange Lingua. St. Francis is the chief of the poetic Franciscan school, in which shone St. Bonaventura, St. Antony, and the blessed Jacopone de Todi, of whom every one knows the beautiful stanzas Stabat Mater Dolorosa, etc. Then comes Dante, who governs Christian ages as Homer did the olden time. And lastly in the same age in Italy, at Vercelli, it is said, lived and died the great unknown who has left us the most beautiful book from the hand of man, The Imitation, the true poem of humanity redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. The fall, the redemption, the grand drama of the moral history of the world, the battle of life, the art of vanquishing passion and matter, the effort of man to reach his ideal on the wings of simplicity and purity —where are those things better chanted than in The Imitation?
The thirteenth century, then, merits to be cited among the grandest epochs of history. However, it would be a false idea to imagine society elevated to a high degree of perfection. Many Christians of our day, charmed by the recital of the life and works of these great saints, and by the sight of the magnificent monuments of the first era of ogival style, become almost melancholy, and have a disposition to blame everything new in the world, and defy their contemporaries or future generations even to imitate the virtues of the age of Innocent III. I think this tendency all wrong, and Christians who permit themselves to be so carried away, lack firmness and faith; for Christianity cannot decay, and the more the saints of the past, the greater the protectors of the church for the future. Besides, it is so easy to regard only the virtues of the thirteenth century, and ignore the vices. We must remember St. Anthony was the neighbor and the contemporary of Ezelin the Ferocious, the type of the tyrant of the modern world. Frederick II. lived in the same age as St. Louis. The Sicilian Code was revised fifty years after the peace of Constance, at the same time as the Magna Charta of England. St. Thomas d'Aquin and Roger Bacon are contemporaries of the Albigenses. You cannot point out in our age an error or a calamity that has not its equal, or rather its precursor, in the thirteenth century.
Caesarism, vanquished in politics, was protected by the literary men and the jurists. Dante in his old days wrote the Caesarian treatise, De Monarchico. It was in the beginning of the fourteenth century, a hundred years after Innocent III., that the popes, chased from Rome and Italy, set out for the exile of Avignon, which lasted seventy-five years.
III.
A reasonable study of such grandeur and such fall, the review of which must demonstrate human liberty, should make us better know our own age, and love it the more.
We possess more elements of material prosperity and material progress, and we jealously preserve the depository of all the moral truths. We enjoy greater political security, and the sentiment of right is more general in our day than in any other.
What we want, what has given an expansive power and grandeur and beauty to the thirteenth century, is a moral unity in the general direction of civil society. Our epoch feels its instinct, it seeks it, it desires it. People submit to the heaviest sacrifices, and agitate themselves to obtain what they call their unity. It is a false, factious, exterior unity, I know, but after all, it is unity.
But a true, living, and moral unity can only be found in efforts such as I have tried to depict; and moral unity, which should be the only legitimate aim of a people, is not established by force, nor even by the splendor of industrial production, nor the attractions of an economical well-being. It will only grow as the people liberally accept the direction of the Christian law. Expelled from political constitutions, I see this unity reconstitute itself in the masses. The neighboring democracies should be Christian. Recently we have met a battalion of crusaders, going to Rome, and coming from North America, which will soon add to the number of its bishops as many as presided at the Council of Nice. To manifest with new éclat the fact of Christianity, and advance so salutary a movement, which will perhaps produce moral splendors unknown to the thirteenth century, we must arm ourselves, under the buckler of faith, with the science and rights of the citizen, as did the great doctors of the thirteenth century.
This struggle, I know, is to-day more difficult, but therefore more meritorious, more glorious. Nowhere have we the support of governments. I do not complain—I state a fact; and perhaps this very support is a defect because it has been so much abused. The purity of the moral struggle of the thirteenth century is tarnished by the religious persecutions. I know the adversaries of the church have exaggerated their intensity; but I know also that never has the church, as a church, persecuted, nor given or proclaimed the right to persecute. Besides, we must not lose sight of the fact that the alliance of church and state was such that a heresy was considered above everything a crime against the state. For example, we are astonished to see a Saint Louis condemn severely the blasphemers of God as state criminals; but we do not consider it extraordinary nowadays to see the blasphemers of a sovereign or minister condemned to prison, exile, or transportation. It is necessary to remark that the greater part of the sects of the middle ages proclaimed principles the realization of which would have consequences of great civil and political importance. I defy our contemporary societies, so proud of their religious tolerance, to support the worship of the Mormons, those pests of our age. Only Christian societies are strong enough to resist such currents of corruption, to preserve their integrity, to endure and develop by the side of such sects. Christians alone can be tolerant with impunity, because tolerance for them is not a social necessity, but a virtue. Only they can repeat with Saint Augustine: "Let us convert the heretics, but let them not be sacrificed." So when we think of the universal blame of which St. Ambrose and St. Martin made themselves interpreters, against the condemnation to death of the Priscillians, those Mormons of the fourteenth century, we are justly astonished at the rigors exercised in the thirteenth century against the Albigenses and other sectarians. To-day, thanks be to God, a religious persecution could not be possible in countries where the Catholic religion predominates. Persecutions are only prevalent among the Mussulmans of Asia Minor or the schismatics of Poland; and if the Protestants of Ireland or the liberal anti-Catholics of the Continent have such tendencies, they devise some form which to them alone appears as progress.
For the contest, then, we must act as citizens, and use the pen and the word, and without truce or relaxation. When St. Francis Xavier made in the Indies his great and admirable spiritual conquests, destroyed by the Holland Protestants and the English, he asked for reinforcements from the superior of his order. "Especially," said he, "send me from Belgium those robust and broad-shouldered men." With such, this great saint believed himself able to encounter every difficulty. Their race is not extinct, thank God; and it seems to me Europeans are easier conquered than Asiatics.