From Queen Mary's Prayer-book, A.D. 1553.
As the reader has now before his eyes a sufficient number of specimens of the grotesque ecclesiastical ornamentation of the period under consideration, he is prepared to consider the question which has perplexed so many students besides Mr. Malcolm: How are we to account for these indecencies in places and books consecrated to devotion? A voice from the Church of the fifth century gives us the hint of the true answer. "You ask me," writes St. Nilus to Olympiodorus of Alexandria, "if it is becoming in us to cover the walls of the sanctuary with representations of animals of all kinds, so that we see upon them snares set, hares, goats, and other beasts in full flight before hunters exhausting themselves in taking and pursuing them with their dogs; and, again, upon the bank of a river, all kinds of fish caught by fishermen. I answer you that this is a puerility with which to amuse the eyes of the faithful."[4] To one who is acquainted with the history and genius of the Roman Catholic Church, this very simple explanation of the incongruity is sufficient. The policy of that wonderful organization in every age has been to make every possible concession to ignorance that is compatible with the continuance of ignorance. It has sought always to amuse, to edify, to moralize, and console ignorance, but never to enlighten it. The mind that planned the magnificent cathedral at Rheims, of which Mr. Tomes was so much enamored, and the artists who designed the glorious San Carlo that kindled rapture in the poetical mind of Mr. Howells, did indeed permit the scandalous burlesques that disfigure their walls; but they only permitted them. It was a concession which they had to grant to the ignorant multitude whose unquestioning faith alone made these enormous structures possible.
We touch here the question insinuated by Gibbon in his first volume, where he plainly enough intimates his belief that Christianity was a lapse into barbarism rather than a deliverance from it. Plausible arguments in the same direction have been frequently made since Gibbon's time by comparing the best of Roman civilization with the worst of the self-torturing monkery of the early Christian centuries. In a debate on this subject in New York not long since between a member of the bar and a doctor of divinity, both of them gentlemen of learning, ability, and candor, the lawyer pointed to the famous picture of St. Jerome (A.D. 375), naked, grasping a human skull, his magnificent head showing vast capacity paralyzed by an absorbing terror, and exclaimed, "Behold the lapse from Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, the Plinys, and the Antonines!" The answer made by the clergyman was, "That is not Christianity! In the Christian books no hint of that, no utterance justifying that, can be found." Perhaps neither of the disputants succeeded in expressing the whole truth on this point. The vaunted Roman civilization was, in truth, only a thin crust upon the surface of the empire, embracing but one small class in each province, the people everywhere being ignorant slaves. Into that inert mass of servile ignorance Christianity enters, and receives from it the interpretation which ignorance always puts upon ideas advanced or new, interpreting it as hungry French peasants in 1792 and South Carolina negroes in 1870 interpreted modern ideas of human rights. The new leaven set the mass heaving and swelling until the crust was broken to pieces. The civilization of Marcus Aurelius was lost. From parchment scrolls poetry and philosophy were obliterated, that the sheets might be used for prayers and meditations. The system of which St. Jerome was the product and representative was a baleful mixture, of which nine-tenths were Hindoo and the remaining tenth was half Christian and half Plato.
The true inference to be drawn is that no civilization is safe, nor even genuine, until it embraces all classes of the community; and the promulgation of Christianity was the first step toward that.
As the centuries wore on, the best of the clergy grew restive under this monstrous style of ornamentation. "What purpose," wrote St. Bernard, about A.D. 1140, "serve in our cloisters, under the eyes of the brothers and during their pious readings, those ridiculous monstrosities, those prodigies of beauties deformed or deformities made beautiful? Why those nasty monkeys, those furious lions, those monstrous centaurs, those animals half human, those spotted tigers, those soldiers in combat, those huntsmen sounding the horn? Here a single head is fitted to several bodies; there upon a single body there are several heads; now a quadruped has a serpent's tail, and now a quadruped's head figures upon a fish's body. Sometimes it is a monster with the fore parts of a horse and the hinder parts of a goat; again an animal with horns ends with the hind quarters of a horse. Everywhere is seen a variety of strange forms, so numerous and so odd that the brothers occupy themselves more in deciphering the marbles than their books, and pass whole days in studying all those figures much more attentively than the divine law. Great God! if you are not ashamed of such useless things, how, at least, can you avoid regretting the enormity of their cost?"
How, indeed! The honest abbé was far from seeing the symbolical meaning in those odd figures which modern investigators have imagined. He was simply ashamed of the ecclesiastical caricatures; but a century or two later ingenious writers began to cover them with the fig-leaves of a symbolical interpretation. According to the ingenious M. Durand, who wrote (A.D. 1459) thirty years before Luther was born, every part of a cathedral has its spiritual meaning. The stones of which it is built represent the faithful, the lime that forms part of the cement is an emblem of fervent charity, the sand mingled with it signifies the actions undertaken by us for the good of our brethren, and the water in which these ingredients blend is the symbol of the Holy Ghost. The hideous shapes sculptured upon the portals are, of course, malign spirits flying from the temple of the Lord, and seeking refuge in the very substance of the walls! The great length of the temple signifies the tireless patience with which the faithful support the ills of this life in expectation of their celestial home; its breadth symbolizes that large and noble love which embraces both the friends and the enemies of God; its height typifies the hope of final pardon; the roof beams are the prelates, who by the labor of preaching exhibit the truth in all its clearness; the windows are the Scriptures, which receive the light from the sun of truth, and keep out the winds, snows, and hail of heresy and false doctrine devised by the father of schism and falsehood; the iron bars and pins that sustain the windows are the general councils, ecumenical and orthodox, which have sustained the holy and canonical Scriptures; the two perpendicular stone columns which support the windows are the two precepts of Christian charity, to love God and our neighbor; the length of the windows shows the profundity and obscurity of Scripture, and their roundness indicates that the Church is always in harmony with itself.
This is simple enough. But M. Jérôme Bugeaud, in his collection of "Chansons Populaires" of the western provinces of France, gives part of a catechism still taught to children, though coming down from the Middle Ages, which carries this quaint symbolizing to a point of the highest absurdity. The catechism turns upon the sacred character of the lowly animal that most needed any protection which priestly ingenuity could afford. Here are a few of the questions and answers:
Priest. "What signify the two ears of the ass?"