Heart of Europe

by Ralph Adams Cram

The era-making movements in religion all began outside our territorial limits at Monte Cassino, Cluny, Clairveaux, but it was through St. Benedict of Aniane that Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle effected his regeneration of the Church and his initiation of a new Christian education and culture; St. Bruno, of Cologne, sometime head of the cathedral school of Reims, was the founder of the Order of Carthusians; St. Chrodegang, Archbishop of Metz, brought into existence the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, who introduced into cathedral chapters the order and discipline of monasticism; St. Norbert, of Xanten, created the Order of Prémontré, one of the most beneficent and beautiful of the religious brotherhoods of the Middle Ages, while the “Imitation of Christ,” the most purely spiritual and devotional work of the time, was the product of Thomas à Kempis, an obscure monk of the Netherlands. In the development of Christian mysticism the Rhine valley stands pre-eminent, though the greatest of all those of this school of combined thought and vision was Hugh of St. Victor, of the monastery of Augustinian Canons in Paris, on the banks of the Seine, where now is the Jardin des Plantes, The ancient tradition is that he was born near Ypres, though recent researches seem to indicate that he may have been a son of the Count of Blankenburg in Saxony. In any case, he was the great expositor of sacramental religion and philosophy as Charlemagne’s Radbertus Paschasus was the great defender of the true doctrine of Transubstantiation. If, indeed, Hugh of St. Victor was a product of Flanders, then the credit goes there of having given birth to one of the noblest and most penetrating minds the world has known, one that ranks with that greatest pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Whether one accepts the mysticism of the Rhine or not does not matter; it was a potent element in the flowering of Christian piety and the development of Catholic theology, and Elizabeth of Schönau, Hildegarde of Bingen, Mary of Ognies, Liutgard of Tongres, Mechtilde of Magdebourg, are all names that connote a poignancy of spiritual experience that proves both the personal exaltation of the time and the quality of the blood that had issue in character such as theirs. This mystical vision of the holy women of the Rhine is simply an extreme intensification of the same vision that was given in lesser measure and in different ways to all the creative artists, philosophers, and theologians of the Middle Ages, from Othloh of the eleventh to St. Bonaventure of the thirteenth century, and it had a great part in determining and fixing the artistic manifestation of this amazing time. Both as a result and an influence it is vastly important and not to be ignored. Out of it came much of that marvellous symbolism of the mass and the cathedral so explicitly set forth by the monk Durandus and Vincent of Beauvais, and for its good offices here alone the world owes it a deep and lasting gratitude.

One is tempted to go on through other fields where the harvest is plenteous, but an end must be made, and it is here. There remains the question of the issue of it all—whether out of this latest devastation that so adequately follows those of the nineteenth century, of the French Revolution, of Protestantism and the wars of religion, of the Hundred Years’ War with England, any compensation may come for the progressive (and as yet unfinished) destruction of the art records of a great past. If we consider alone the wide ruin in Flanders and Brabant, in Artois and Picardy and Champagne, there seems no possible compensation for what we ourselves knew and now have lost for ever. Nevertheless, the law of the universe is death that life may come; and out of this present death that is so immeasurably more wide-spread and inclusive than any known before, even when the Huns or the Moslems were on their deadly march across Europe, there should come a proportionately fuller life, a “life more abundant,” than that which is now in dissolution. If this is so, if we can look across the plains of death and immeasurable destruction to the dimly seen peaks of the mountain frontiers of a new Land of Promise, then we can see Louvain and Liége, Ypres and Arras, Laon and Soissons and Reims pass in the crash and the dim smoke of obliteration, content with their tragic destiny, even as we can see poured out as a new oblation the ten millions of lives, the tears of an hundred millions of those who follow down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Is it all a vain oblation? There is the crucial question and the answer is left with us. This is no war of economic and industrial rivalry, of jealous dynasties, of opposed political theories; it is not the inevitable result of a malignant diplomacy from Frederick the Great and Metternich to Disraeli and the German Kaiser; it is not even the last act in a drama ushered in by Machiavelli and brought to its denouement at Pottsdam. All these and myriad other strands have gone to the weaving of the poisoned shirt of Nessus, but they all are blind agents, tools of a dominant and supreme destiny by which are brought about the events that are only the way of working of an unescapable fate. The war is a culminating catastrophe, but it is as well the greatest mercy ever extended to men, for it may be made the means of a great purging, the atonement for the later sins of the world, the redemption from a wilful blindness and folly that are not consonant with the will of God.

There is a stern propriety in the centring around the Cathedral of Reims of the first phase of the great conflict, and in its slow and implacable demolition. Long ago Heinrich Heine, the poet of the German people, though not himself a German, saw clearly the coming ruin and wrote as follows:

Christianity—and this is its highest merit—has in some degree softened, but it could not destroy, the brutal German joy of battle. When once the taming talisman, the Cross, breaks in two, the savagery of the old fighters, the senseless Berserker fury of which the northern poets sing and say so much, will gush up anew. That talisman is decayed, and the day will come when it will piteously collapse. Then the old stone gods will rise from the silent ruins, and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes. Thor, with his giant’s hammer, will at last spring up, and shatter to bits the Gothic cathedrals.

Better than any other, he has declared the nature of this war that arose a century after his death. Thor, the impersonation of conscienceless and unmitigated force, shatters in pieces the Gothic cathedrals because he and they are antitheses and they cannot exist in the same world. Like Barbarossa sitting stonily in his dim cave under ground, century after century, while his beard grows through the rocky table before him, waiting for the call that will send him forth into the world again, primitive force and primitive craft have sullenly awaited the day when the Christian dispensation passes and they issue again into the light. In the fulness of time their day arrives and their first task is to destroy the symbol of their ended bondage. With the name of Christ on their lips and the boast of Christian civilisation in their mouths, the nations and the peoples forsake Christianity until only the nomenclature remains and the memorials of its power and glory.

Reims falls, but that which built Reims fell long ago, while the devious undermining and the blind sapping began even while the last cubits were being added to its stature, and since then has been only a steady progression in strength and assurance of its antitheses—of materialism, intellectualism, secularism, industrialism, opportunism, efficiency; founded on the coal and iron of the Scar of Europe and on the sinister and ingratiating philosophy that came out of a re-entrant paganism, thrived under the fertilisation of an evolutionary empiricism, flowered in a Nietzsche, a Treitschke, and a Bernhardi. And always it presented itself in a gracious guise; intellectual emancipation, humanitarianism, social service, democratic liberty, evolution, parliamentary government, progress, direct approach of each soul to God. It all sounded fine and high and noble, and on the 30th day of July, 1914, there could have been hardly a thousand men in the world, apart from those in the secret, who would not have said—there were not a thousand in Europe who did not believe—that man in his regular progress from lower ever to higher things had achieved a plane where the wars and savagery and lies of the past were no longer possible.

And in one week from that fateful 30th of July the cloud castle had dissolved in a rain of blood. Could conviction have come to the world in any other way? Would the diseased body have reacted to a gentle prophylactic, could the Surgeon have spared His knife? Since the knife is used, the answer admits of no dispute, but will it be enough? This is the question that is asked on every battle-field of a world at war; the lesson is set for the learning—will the nations learn? In so far as they have diverged from what Reims stood for; from Leo IX and Gregory VII and Innocent III; from Edward I and Ferdinand III and Louis IX; from Eleanor of Guienne and Blanche of Castile and Margaret of Malines; from St. Bernard, St. Norbert, and St. Anselm; from Albertus Magnus and Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas, just so far have they to return, bringing with them not empty hands but all the great good winnowed from the harvest of grain and chaff they have reaped in those years of spiritual and material and national disorder that began when the dizzy fabric of mediævalism trembled to its base at the exile at Avignon and “piteously collapsed” between the nailing at Wittenberg and the sansculotte throning of the “Goddess of Reason” in the desecrated cathedral of Notre Dame. There is good grain in plenty, but it is sowed along with the chaff and the tares, and now for the last harvesting the grain has germinated only to dwindle and die, for the tares have sprung up and choked it and the red garnering is of tares alone.

Men would think, as they follow the scarlet annals of war, that the lesson was sufficiently clear even for pacificists to read as they run, but is it so? France reads and learns, gloriously regenerate, blotting out the memory of old folly with her blood of sacrifice, turning again as her first King Clovis was adjured by St. Remi of Reims, destroying what she worshipped a year ago, worshipping what then, and for two centuries before, she had destroyed. Again France shows the way, traversing it with bleeding feet and with many tears; Russia is learning it, though she had less to unlearn; Belgium must have learned it through her blind martyrdom; but how of the others? Is England learning, and Italy; will Germany learn, and Austria; will America learn, standing aloof from the smoking altar of sacrifice; will the Church learn, there in trembling isolation while again Peter listens for the crowing of the cock? If not, if when silence comes down on a decimated, an exhausted, a bankrupt world, the old ways are sought again and men go on as before, then the myriad lives and the dreary rain of tears are indeed a vain oblation, and all will be to do over again. God sets no lesson that need not be learned, and unless out of it all comes an old heaven and a new earth, then the lesson is set again, as time after time it was set for imperial Rome, until a century of war and pestilence and famine broke down her insolent pride and made from the ruins of her vainglory a foundation for a new civilisation in the strength of the Christianity she had denied.