Enough has been said on a topic to which prominence has been given because it brings into fuller relief the fact that in a religion for which its apologists claim divine origin and guidance “to the end of the world” we have the same intrusion of the rites and customs of lower cults which marks other advanced faiths. Hence, science and superstition being deadly foes, the explanation of that hostile attitude toward inquiry and that dread of its results which marked Christianity down to modern times. While the intrusion of corrupting elements presents difficulties which the theory of the supernatural history of Christianity alone creates, it accords with all that might be predicted of a religion whose success was due to its early escape from the narrow confines of Judaism; and to its fortunate contact with the enterprising peoples to whom the civilization of Europe and the New World is due.
2. From Augustine to Lord Bacon.
A. D. 400-A. D. 1600.
The foregoing slight outline of the causes which operated for centuries against the freedom of the human mind will render it needless to follow the history of the development of Christian polity and dogma—the temporalizing of the one, and the crystallizing of the other. Yet one prominent actor in that history demands a brief notice, because of the influence which his teaching wielded from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. The annals of the churches in Africa, along whose northern shores Christianity had spread early and rapidly, yield notable names, but none so distinguished as that of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 395 to 430 A. D. This greatest of the Fathers of the Church sought, as has been remarked already, to bring the system of Aristotle, the greatest of ancient naturalists, into line with Christian theology. His range of study was well-nigh as wide as that of the famous Stagirite, but we are here concerned only with so much of it as bears on an attempt to graft the development theory on the dogma of special creation. Augustine, accepting the Old Testament cosmogony as a revelation, believed that the world was created out of nothing, but, this initial paradox accepted, he argued that God had endowed matter with certain powers of self-development which left free the operation of natural causes in the production of plants and animals. With this, however, as already noted, he held, with preceding philosophers and with his fellow-theologians, the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It explained to him the existence of apparently purposeless creatures, as flies, frogs, mice, etc. “Certain very small animals,” he says, “may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter.” Not till the seventeenth century did the experiments of Redi refute a doctrine which had held part of the biological field for above two thousand years, and which still has adherents. Of course Augustine, as do modern Catholic biologists, excepted man from the operation of secondary causes, and held that his soul was created by the direct intervention of the Creator. Augustine’s concessions are, therefore, more seeming than real, and, moreover, we find him denying the existence of the antipodes on the ground that Scripture is silent about them, and also, that if God had placed any races there, they could not see Christ descending at his second coming. To Augustine the air was full of devils who are the cause of “all diseases of Christians.” In other words, he was not ahead of the illusions of his age. Then, too, he shows that allegorizing spirit which was manifest in Greece a thousand years earlier; the spirit which reads hidden meanings in Homer, in Horace, and in Omar Khayyám; and which, in the hands of present-day Gnostics, mostly fantastic or illiterate cabalists, converts the plain narratives of Old and New Testaments into vehicles of mysterious types and esoteric symbols. It is in such allegorical vein that Augustine explains the outside and inside pitching of the ark as typifying the safety of the Church from the leaking-in of heresy; while the ghastly application of symbolical exegetics is seen in his citation of the words of Jesus, “Compel them to come in,” as a Divine warrant for the slaughter of heretics.
We shall meet with no other such commanding figure in Church history till nine hundred years have passed, when Thomas Aquinas, the “Angel of the Schools,” appears, but although that period marks no advance of the Church from her central position, it witnessed changes in her fortune through the intrusion of a strange people into her territory and sanctuaries.
Perhaps there are few events in history more impressive than the conversion of the wild and ignorant Arab tribes of the seventh century from stone-worship to monotheism. The series of conquests which followed had also, as an indirect and unforeseen result, effects of vast importance in the revival and spread of Greek culture from the Tigris to the Guadalquivir. It is not easy, neither does the inquiry fall within our present purpose, to discover the special impulses which led Mohammed, the leader of the movement, to preach a new faith whose one creed, stripped of all subtleties, was the unity of God. Large numbers of Jews and Christians had settled in Arabia long before his time, and he had become acquainted with the narrowness of the one, and with the causes of the wranglings of the other, riven, as these last-named were, into sects quarrelling over the nature of the Person of Christ. These, and the fetichism of his fellow-countrymen, may, perhaps, have impelled him to start a crusade the mandate for which he, in fanatic impulse, believed came from heaven. The result is well known. The hitherto untamed nomads became the eager instruments of the prophet. Under his leadership, and that of the able Khalifs who succeeded him, the flag of Islam was carried from East to West, till within one hundred years of the flight of Mohammed from Mecca (622 A. D.) it waved from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. With the conquest of Syria there was achieved one of the greatest and most momentous of triumphs in the capture of Jerusalem, and the seizure of sites sanctified to Christians by association with the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Only a few years before (614 A. D.), the holy city had been taken by Chosroes; the sacred buildings raised over the venerated tomb had been burned, and the cross—a spurious relic—carried off by the Persian king. These places have been, as it were, the cockpit of Christendom from the time of the siege of Jerusalem under Titus to that of the Crimean war, when blood was spilt like water in a conflict stirred by squabbles between Latin and Greek Christians over possession of the key of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre these sectaries are still kept from flying at one another’s throats by the muskets of Mohammedan soldiers.
The Arabian conquest of Persia followed that of Syria. The turn of Egypt soon came, the city of Alexandria being taken in 640, seven years after the prophets’ death. Since the loss of Greek freedom, and the decay of intellectual life at Athens, that renowned place had become, notably under the Ptolemies, the chief home of science and philosophy. Through the propagandism of Christianity among the Hellenized Jews, of whom, as of Greeks, large numbers had settled there, it was also the birthplace of dogmatic theology, and, therefore, the fountain whence welled the controversies whose logomachies were the gossip of the streets of Constantinople and the cause of bloody persecution. After a few years’ pause, the Saracens (Ar., sharkiin, orientals) resumed their conquering march. They captured and burnt Carthage, another famous centre of Christianity, and then crossed over to Spain. In “the fair and fertile isle of Andalusia” the Gothic king Roderick was aroused from his luxurious life in Toledo to lead his army in gallant, but vain, attempt to repel the infidel invaders. So rapid was their advance that in six years they had subdued the whole of Spain, the north and northwestern portions excepted, for the hardy Basque mountaineers maintained their independence against the Arabs, as they had maintained it against Celt, Roman, and Goth. Only before the walls of Tours did the invaders meet with a rebuff from Charles Martel and his Franks, which arrested their advance in Western Europe; as, in a more momentous defeat before Constantinople by Leo III. in 718, fourteen years earlier, the torrent of Mohammedan conquest was first checked.
Enough, however, of Saracenic wars and their destructive work, which, if tradition lies not, included the burning of the remnants of the vast Alexandrian library. “A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may contradict it,” and Islam has ever been a worse foe to science than Christianity. Its association, as a religion, with the renaissance of knowledge, was as wholly accidental as the story of it is interesting.
Under the Sassanian kings, Persia had become an active centre of intellectual life, reaching the climax of its Augustan age in the reign of Chosroes. Jew, Greek, and Christian alike had welcome at his court, and translations of the writings of the Indian sages completed the eclecticism of that enlightened monarch. Then came the ruthless Arab, and philosophy and science were eclipsed. But with the advent of the Abbaside Khalifs, who number the famous Haroun al-Raschid among them, there came revival of the widest toleration, and consequent return of intellectual activity. Baghdad arose as the seat of empire. Situated on the high road of Oriental commerce, along which travelled foreign ideas and foreign culture, that city became also the Oxford of her time. Arabic was the language of the conquerors, and into that poetic, but unphilosophic, tongue, Greek philosophy and science were rendered. Under the rule of those Khalifs, says Renan, “nontolerant, nonreluctant persecutors,” free thought developed; the Motecallenim or “disputants” held debates, where all religions were examined in the light of reason. Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, and Ptolemy were text-books in the colleges, the repute of whose teachers brought to Baghdad and Naishapur (dear to lovers of “old” Khayyám) students westward from Spain, and eastward from Transoxiana.
“Arab” philosophy, therefore, is only a name. It has been well described as “a system of Greek thought expressed in a Semitic tongue; and modified by Oriental influences called into existence by the patronage of the more liberal princes, and kept alive by the zeal of a small band of thinkers.” In the main, it began and ended with the study of Aristotle, commentaries on whom became the chief work of scholars, at whose head stands the great name of Averroes. Through these—a handful of Jews and Moslems—knowledge of Greek science, of astronomy, algebra, chemistry, and medicine, was carried into Western Europe. By the latter half of the tenth century, one hundred and fifty years after the translation of Aristotle into Arabic, Spain had become no mean rival of Baghdad and Cairo. Schools were founded; colleges to which the Girton girls of the period could repair to learn mathematics and history were set up by lady principals; manufactures and agriculture were encouraged; and lovely and stately palaces and mosques beautified Seville, Cordova, Toledo, and Granada, which last-named city the far-famed Alhâmra or Red Fortress still overlooks. Seven hundred years before there was a public lamp in London, and when Paris was a town of swampy roadways bordered by windowless dwellings, Cordova had miles of well-lighted, well-paved streets; and the constant use of the bath by the “infidel” contrasted with the saintly filth and rags which were the pride of flesh-mortifying devotees and the outward and odorous signs of their religion. The pages of our dictionaries evidence in familiar mathematical and chemical terms; in the names of the principal “fixed” stars; and in the words “admiral” and “chemise”; the influence of the “Arab” in science, war, and dress.