And our readers will remember remarks of a like bearing in the quotation last given. Such criticisms are, however, to us merely evidence of so many curious misapprehensions. They merely show that an acquaintance with the history of religious art is but a very inadequate preparation for writing the history of religious dogmas. It is perfectly impossible to represent spiritual things in painting and sculpture otherwise than by material images. Nothing is more common than so to represent them even among Protestants of the present day; nothing was more common in the Old Testament, the very stronghold of the ancient anthropomorphites. We feel no inclination to deny that it is exceedingly difficult for the poor and the ignorant to rise to the conception of a spirit, and almost all mankind represent to themselves even the very Deity under some refined material image; but when such representations occupied a prominent position in public worship, there was an opportunity, and that frequently made use of, of correcting an untruthful imagination.
We have no hesitation in saying that there is far more unconscious anthropomorphism among the Protestant than among the Catholic poor. The doctrines of revelation make known a world akin to, yet not the same as, this; they tell of an order of things itself unseen, but possessing counterparts and shadows here. It is, therefore, not wonderful that there exists a constant tendency to forget that these are but imperfect types and symbols, and to remodel the truths of faith into conformity with what we see around us. To correct this tendency is one of the functions of the science of theology; and the conclusions of theology, infiltrating among the people, keep them from sinking into earthly and anthropomorphic views of religion, these conclusions being communicated by the ordinary resources in the hands of the church, which, certainly, are far more efficacious in the Catholic than in the Protestant system. Indeed, of all the reproaches which have been directed against the theology of the middle ages, that of being in its spirit gross and material is one of the most unfounded and the most unjust. With far greater truth might such a reproach be directed against the Protestant theology of the last three centuries. In the middle ages, theology had a code and a standard of her own; she was the queen of the sciences; she regulated and moulded the ideas of the time. Now, condemned to occupy a subordinate position, she is content to take her ideas from those current in the world, and to use her terms, not in their proper and theological signification, but in the meanings derived from the manner of their present use in physical science and in common life. An example of this occurs in the case of the word person, the loss of the theological meaning of which among Protestants has confused, if not obliterated, the doctrine of the Trinity. In Protestantism, the belief of the people lives chiefly by a tradition propagated through no recognized theological channel; a tradition which, consequently, daily grows more feeble and less definite; which is continually becoming more and more corrupted, more low, and earthly, and anthropomorphous. Look at the common Protestant idea of the happiness of the blessed. The great Catholic doctrine which places the essence of the beatitude of man, not in a prolongation and refinement of the pleasures of this world, not even in the sight of Christ's humanity, but in that vision of God as God which is emphatically called beatific, had almost faded out of sight. They look forward to an earthly millennium, which is little better than a glorification of commerce, material prosperity, and natural virtue, to be succeeded by a heaven of which the joys very much resemble those which some Catholic theologians with Suarez [Footnote 15] assign to infants who die without baptism. But against the reproach of lowness and materialism of conception being ever directed against the theologians of mediaeval times, the doctrine of the beatific vision, which they so fully and so beautifully evolved, stands a perpetual protest. For in what was this coarseness and lowness of thought more likely to appear, than in their conception of the greatest happiness of man? Or who were more likely to teach what is far removed from vulgar and worldly conceptions than men who placed the sum of all happiness in the vision and fruition of divine essence, which, according to them, could be seen by no corporal eye, [Footnote 16] and in which was, they said, that joy which eye had not seen nor ear heard, neither had it entered into the heart of man to conceive? The whole of the scholastic treatise De Deo Uno is but another magnificent protest against such an accusation. The heresy of Gilbert Porretanus [Footnote 17] would never be condemned by the Protestants of the present day; nor has ever the conception of the divine simplicity in perfection been so fully realized as it was by those much-abused theologians. The mediatorship of our blessed Lord is now commonly apprehended by Protestants in a manner which makes a real difference of character between the father and son; but no one who knows anything of the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation can imagine that these theologians would have tolerated for a moment a notion so frightfully heretical. With respect to psychology, the scholastic age saw the death of Traducianism; and anyone who has attended to the earlier scholastic opinions respecting the manner in which spirits suffer in the penal fire, will have seen that they are of a more "spiritual" tendency than those of most Protestant theologians. [Footnote 18]
[Footnote 15: De Peccato Originall.]
[Footnote 16: St. Thomas, in ima & q.12, a. 3; and other older authors in Sent. i. 1, d.1, & l. 4, d.49]
[Footnote 17: Lombardus in Sent. i. 1, d.33, 34; and the commentators ad loc.]
[Footnote 18: Sensation and "sensitive imagination" appeared to the scholastic to be of sole material a character, that they would not admit that these and other sensitive affections can exist in a separate spirit; and, consequently, those theologians who explain the punishment of separate spirits by the analogy of the soul and body, were compelled to admit that the pain must be different in kind from the "passio conjuncti.">[
Mr. Lecky's criticisms on the opinion that the penal fire is literal and material, and on the supposed general materialism of religious conception in the middle ages, have led us into somewhat of a digression. We have yet, however, one more remark to make. While he concedes that after the time of Averrhoes "a few writers" endeavored to rise to a more spiritual manner of conceiving the truths of faith, he asserts that in the preceding period, before his influence and that of such sects as the Beguins had begun to be felt, the state of things was infinitely worse. From the sixth to the twelfth century materialism in religion was absolutely dominant. That the period preceding the advent of the scholastic epoch was one of great depression of theological science, cannot be doubted; and the amount of what may in a general way be called anthropomorphism current at any period is to a great extent conditioned by the want of general cultivation. But it is very easy to overrate this depression. The episcopal and synodical letters, for instance, which were exchanged concerning the subject of adoptionism do not present to us theological science at, by any means, a low ebb. The same may be said respecting the controversy in the ninth century on the Eucharist; and the controversy on Predestination, if it do not reveal any large amount of historical learning, at least exhibits considerable activity of mind. Such of the writings of authors of that period as the present writer has looked into, show an amount of learning and acuteness which was certainly unexpected by him. That period was necessarily uncritical; but we regard the taste for allegorizing, then as formerly prevalent, to be an indication of something very different from a degraded and material habit of thought. The great teacher of the pre-scholastic age was St. Augustine, one of the most spiritual of the fathers; and the writer who was chosen to supplement him was St. Gregory the Great, who went farther than, and improved on, St. Augustine himself. And, as to the religious art of that period, Mr. Lecky has himself alluded to a peculiarity which, strangely enough, seems to have given him no disquietude as to his general conclusion. In that period, he says:
"We do not find the smallest tendency to represent God the Father. [Footnote 19] Scenes, indeed, in which he acted were frequently depicted, but the First Person of the Trinity was invariably superseded by the Second. Christ, in the dress and with the features appropriated to him in the representations of scenes from the New Testament, and often with the monogram underneath his figure, is represented creating man, condemning Adam and Eve to labor, ... or giving the law to Moses. With the exception of a hand sometimes extended from the cloud, and occasionally encircled with a nimbus, we find in this period no traces in art of the Creator. At first we can easily imagine that a purely spiritual conception of the Deity, and also the hatred that was inspired by the type of Jupiter, would have discouraged artists from attempting such a subject, and Gnosticism, which exercised a very great influence over Christian art, and which emphatically denied the divinity of the God of the Old Testament, tended in the same direction; but it is very unlikely that these reasons can have had any weight between the sixth and the twelfth centuries. For the more those centuries are studied, the more evident it becomes that the universal and irresistible tendency was then to materialize every spiritual conception, to form a palpable image of everything that was reverenced, to reduce all subjects within the domain of the senses."—(Vol. i. pp. 224-5.)
[Footnote 19: We cannot ourselves, as Catholics, admit that there is necessarily the smallest impropriety or inexpediency in picture or sculptured representations of God the Father (See Denzinger, n. 1182 and 1482); yet we may fairly argue that the absence of such, at the period in question, disproves Mr. Lecky's assertion that the dominant tendency of that period was anthropomorphous.]