A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

It is always to be remembered, here as before, that Christianity is not the efficient cause of the failures or the evils which happen under its auspices: we are not to suppose that had Osirianism or Judaism or Manichæism or Mithraism chanced to be the religion of Europe these failures and evils would have been averted. What we are to realize is, on the other hand, that the conventional view as to Christianity having been an abnormally efficient cause for good is a delusion. It is not Christianity that has civilized Europe, but Europe—the complex of political and culture forces—that has civilized Christianity. Byzantium and Abyssinia show what the religious system could amount to of itself. Western Europe surpassed these States in virtue of conditions more propitious to energy and to freedom: that was the difference. At the best, medieval Europe was a world of chronic strife, daily injustice, normal cruelty, abundant misery, and ever-present disease. To show that Christianity, that is, the holding of the Christian creed by the men of that world, made these evils less than they would have been in the same place under any other creed, is impossible. On the other hand, it is clear that the influence of Christian doctrine and tradition was on some sides conservative of evil and obstructive of good.

Those tendencies may indeed be regarded as operating in the intellectual life, which, though it is in reality only a side of the sociological whole, we shall conveniently consider apart. Under that head too we shall note the influence of the Church for culture on the side of art. But on the side of ordinary life the influence of the clergy as teachers had two specific tendencies which may here be noted. One was the disparagement of women; the other the encouragement of cruelty.

On the first head, as on so many others, the conventional view is a fallacy. That Christianity raised the status of women is still a general assumption; but exact research, even when made by an orthodox theologian, proves the contrary. Down to the nineteenth century, the solidest rights women possessed were those secured to them by ancient Roman law; and the tendency of Christian legislation was certainly to restrict rather than to expand such rights. At the same time the so-called “Manichæan” element in gospel Christianity, the tendency to regard the sexual instinct as something corrupt and unclean, gave to the ordinary language of the Fathers concerning women a tone of detraction and aversion. The one remedy for an overpoise of the sexual element in life, and for over-emphasis of female function on that side, is to secure the community of the sexes in the intellectual life; and organized Christianity, instead of inculcating this, minimized the intellectual life all round, thus making self-restraint a matter of morbid asceticism as against the excess inevitably following on disuse of mind. In particular, a priesthood nominally committed to celibacy, yet always practising in the confessional a morbid inquisition into sexual matters, was committed to treating women disparagingly as forces of “temptation” when it was not yielding thereto. Nothing could be more injurious to women’s real credit. It is true that the worship of the Virgin would in some measure counteract the discredit; but this held equally true of the worship of many pagan Goddesses; and there is nothing to show that the status of women was higher in medieval Christendom than in ancient Egypt. Among the Teutons, the moral status of women seems to have been greatly lowered by the introduction of Christianity.

As regards cruelty, the evidence is only too abundant. Mosheim admits that in the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the Saracens; and it is historically certain that the revival of the ancient practice of judicial torture was the work of the papacy, seeking to extirpate heresy in the thirteenth century. From the tribunals of the Inquisition it passed to the ordinary Church courts, and thence, more slowly, to the courts of justice. In time it became a daily usage. In the old burg of Nuremberg there is preserved a collection (sometimes exhibited elsewhere) of the instruments of torture in common use down to the age of the Reformation. It is an arsenal of horror. Such engines of atrocity were the normal punitive expedients of a world in which the image of the Saviour on the cross was supposed to move men to compassion and contrition; and in which that Saviour’s death was held to redeem men from the penalties of their sins. Here the practical teaching and example of the priesthood was all for cruelty. They presided or assisted when the heretic was racked or burned alive; and their whole conception of morals made for such methods. Holding the madman as possessed by a devil, they taught that he should be cruelly scourged; holding that the leper was stricken by God for sin, they taught that he should be shunned the more. Paganism was saner.

Nothing is more true in social psychology than the hard saying of Feuerbach, that “only where reason rules, does universal love rule: reason is itself nothing else than universal love. It was faith, not love, not reason, that invented Hell.” “Faith has within it a malignant principle.” Medieval Christendom is the demonstration. In that age the spirit of reason was but occasionally glimpsed. It is seen in the teaching of John Scotus, who, besides his concrete heresy on the eucharist, held the all-embracing heresy that authority is derivable solely from reason, and from his pantheism deduced the conviction that the doctrine of hell is but an allegory, the actuality of which would be the negation of divine goodness. But such teaching belonged rather to pagan philosophy than to Christian faith, and was anathematized accordingly. It never reached even the scholarly class in general; and specifically Christian teaching which aimed at softening the heart was spread abroad to little purpose.

§ 2. The Higher Theology and its Effects

There is something saddening, though not really strange, in the failure even of the most attractive elements in medieval Christianity to better the world. To read of the life and teaching of St. Francis of Assisi is to come as it were in the presence of a really elemental force of goodness. His namesake of Sales was a persecutor; but the founder of the Franciscan order seems free of that taint. In him the ecstasy of pietism seems purified of that correlative of fanatic malignity which so constantly dogs it in the literature of ancient Christianity, from the epistles of Paul to the treatises of Augustine. We hear of his love for all animals, of his seldom-failing goodwill to men, and his sweet contentment in humble contemplation. Yet when we study him in relation to his age there fronts us the startling fact that while his active career is almost exactly synchronous with the horrible Albigensian crusades, there is no trace in the records that he was even saddened by them. They ought to have darkened for him the light of the sun; but not once does he seem to have given even a deprecating testimony against them. In him, the flower of medieval Christianity, loyalty to the faith seems to have annulled some of the most vital modes of moral consciousness.

So again with the influence of such a religious classic as the Imitatio Christi, attributed to Thomas à Kempis, but probably the work of several hands, in different countries and centuries. Many men and women must have supposed themselves to live by it; and its influence seems wholly for peace and self-surrender. Yet it would be hard to show that it ever restrained any corporate tendency of a contrary kind, or ruled the corporate life of a single religious sect. The truth is that its message was for a life of isolation, as that of the ideal monk in his cell. Seclusion and not social life, mystic contemplation and not wise activity, duty to God and not duty to man, are its ideals. It was in a manner the Christian counterpart of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or the Enchiridion of Epictetus—a manual of the higher or inner life, making Christianity do for medieval men what Stoicism could do for pagans in the decadent Roman empire. But Stoicism, by Christian consent, made for good government; and there is no trace of any such result from the Imitatio. The model Christian monarch, St. Louis of France, lived in an earlier age; and even he was a fanatic where heresy was concerned, and a promoter of religious wars.

The same fatality appears, again, when we turn to the mystical theology of the German fourteenth-century school of Tauler and Eckhart, in which both Luther and some of our own day have seen a high inspiration. Here, perhaps, we come on the secret of the failure we are considering. Eckhart was a scholar, who had studied and taught at Paris, and ranked as “provincial” of the Dominican order for Saxony; and Tauler was his pupil before settling at Basle. Both men undoubtedly influenced the Brethren of the Free Spirit and others of the so-called Beghards and Beguins, before mentioned, in particular the sect who called themselves the “Friends of God”; and they may so be said to have affected society practically, since these movements aimed at a species of communism. But the essence of their theology was alien to that or any organized movement, and if lived up to would have dissolved it without the interference of the priests and others who under authority drove women of the Beguine movement from their homes and seized their poor goods. “If thou wouldst have the Creator,” says Tauler, “thou must forego the creature. The less of the creature, the more of God. Therefore abjure all creatures, with all their consolations.” Not thus were men in general to be taught to live more brotherlike. The rude world of the Middle Ages went on its way, unaffected in the main either by mysticism or by the movements which set up self-centred societies within society. It needed a more human spirit to affect humanity in mass.