Of all the suffering that was undergone by those brave men who in ages of ignorance and superstition dared to break loose from the trammels of their Church, and who laid the foundation of the liberty we now enjoy, it is this which was probably the most poignant, and which is the least realised. Our imaginations can reproduce with much vividness gigantic massacres like those of the Albigenses or of St. Bartholomew. We can conceive, too, the tortures of the rack and of the boots, the dungeon, the scaffold, and the slow fire. We can estimate, though less perfectly, the anguish which the bold enquirer must have undergone from the desertion of those he most dearly loved, from the hatred of mankind, from the malignant calumnies that were heaped [pg 231] upon his name. But in the chamber of his own soul, in the hours of his solitary meditation, he must have found elements of a suffering that was still more acute. Taught from his earliest childhood to regard the abandonment of his hereditary opinions as the most deadly of crimes, and to ascribe it to the instigation of deceiving dæmons, persuaded that if he died in a condition of doubt he must pass into a state of everlasting torture, his imagination saturated with images of the most hideous and appalling anguish, he found himself alone in the world, struggling with his difficulties and his doubts. There existed no rival sect in which he could take refuge, and where, in the professed agreement of many minds, he could forget the anathemas of the Church. Physical science, that has disproved the theological theories which attribute death to human sin, and suffering to Divine vengeance, and all natural phenomena to isolated acts of Divine intervention—historical criticism, which has dispelled so many imposing fabrics of belief, traced so many elaborate superstitions to the normal action of the undisciplined imagination, and explained and defined the successive phases of religious progress, were both unknown. Every comet that blazed in the sky, every pestilence that swept over the land, appeared a confirmation of the dark threats of the theologian. A spirit of blind and abject credulity, inculcated as the first of duties, and exhibited on all subjects and in all forms, pervaded the atmosphere he breathed. Who can estimate aright the obstacles against which a sincere enquirer in such an age must have struggled? Who can conceive the secret anguish he must have endured in the long months or years during which rival arguments gained an alternate sway over his judgment, while all doubt was still regarded as damnable? And even when his mind was convinced, his imagination would still often revert to his old belief. Our thoughts in after years flow spontaneously, and even unconsciously, in the channels that are formed in youth. In [pg 232] moments when the controlling judgment has relaxed its grasp, old intellectual habits reassume their sway, and images painted on the imagination will live, when the intellectual propositions on which they rested have been wholly abandoned. In hours of weakness, of sickness, and of drowsiness, in the feverish and anxious moments that are known to all, when the mind floats passively upon the stream, the phantoms which reason had exorcised must have often reappeared, and the bitterness of an ancient tyranny must have entered into his soul.
It is one of the greatest of the many services that were rendered to mankind by the Troubadours, that they cast such a flood of ridicule upon the visions of hell, by which the monks had been accustomed to terrify mankind, that they completely discredited and almost suppressed them.[467] Whether, however, the Catholic mind, if unassisted by the literature of Paganism and by the independent thinkers who grew up under the shelter of Mohammedanism, could have ever unwound the chains that had bound it, may well be questioned. The growth of towns, which multiplied secular interests and feelings, the revival of learning, the depression of the ecclesiastical classes that followed the crusades, and, at last, the dislocation of Christendom by the Reformation, gradually impaired the ecclesiastical doctrine, which ceased to be realised before it ceased to be believed. There was, however, another doctrine which exercised a still greater influence in augmenting the riches of the clergy, and in making donations to the Church the chief part of religion. I allude, of course, to the doctrine of purgatory.
A distinguished modern apologist for the middle ages has made this doctrine the object of his special and very characteristic eulogy, because, as he says, by providing a [pg 233] finite punishment graduated to every variety of guilt, and adapted for those who, without being sufficiently virtuous to pass at once into heaven, did not appear sufficiently vicious to pass into hell, it formed an indispensable corrective to the extreme terrorism of the doctrine of eternal punishment.[468] This is one of those theories which, though exceedingly popular with a class of writers who are not without influence in our day, must appear, I think, almost grotesque to those who have examined the actual operation of the doctrine during the middle ages. According to the practical teaching of the Church, the expiatory powers at the disposal of its clergy were so great, that those who died believing its doctrines, and fortified in their last hours by its rites, had no cause whatever to dread the terrors of hell. On the other hand, those who died external to the Church had no prospect of entering into purgatory. This latter was designed altogether for true believers; it was chiefly preached at a time when no one was in the least disposed to question the powers of the Church to absolve any crime, however heinous, or to free the worst men from hell, and it was assuredly never regarded in the light of a consolation. Indeed, the popular pictures of purgatory were so terrific that it may be doubted whether the imagination could ever fully realise, though the reason could easily recognise, the difference between this state and that of the lost. The fire of purgatory, according to the most eminent theologians, was like the fire of hell—a literal fire, prolonged, it was sometimes said, for ages. The declamations of the pulpit described the sufferings of the saved souls in purgatory as incalculably greater than any that were endured by the most wretched mortals upon earth.[469] The rude [pg 234] artists of mediævalism exhausted their efforts in depicting the writhings of the dead in the flames that encircled them. Innumerable visions detailed with a ghastly minuteness the various kinds of torture they underwent,[470] and the monk, who described what he professed to have seen, usually ended by the characteristic moral, that could men only realise those sufferings, they would shrink from no sacrifice to rescue their friends from such a state. A special place, it was said, was reserved in purgatory for those who had been slow in paying their tithes.[471] St. Gregory tells a curious story of a man who was, in other respects, of admirable virtue; but who, [pg 235] in a contested election for the popedom, supported the wrong candidate, and without, as it would appear, in any degree refusing to obey the successful candidate when elected, continued secretly of opinion that the choice was an unwise one. He was accordingly placed for some time after death in boiling water.[472] Whatever may be thought of its other aspects, it is impossible to avoid recognising in this teaching a masterly skill in the adaptation of means to ends, which almost rises to artistic beauty. A system which deputed its minister to go to the unhappy widow in the first dark hour of her anguish and her desolation, to tell her that he who was dearer to her than all the world besides was now burning in a fire, and that he could only be relieved by a gift of money to the priests, was assuredly of its own kind not without an extraordinary merit.
If we attempt to realise the moral condition of the society of Western Europe in the period that elapsed between the downfall of the Roman Empire and Charlemagne, during which the religious transformations I have noticed chiefly arose, we shall be met by some formidable difficulties. In the first place, our materials are very scanty. From the year a.d. 642, when the meagre chronicle of Fredigarius closes, to the biography of Charlemagne by Eginhard, a century later, there is an almost complete blank in trustworthy history, and we are reduced to a few scanty and very doubtful notices in the chronicles of monasteries, the lives of saints, and the decrees of Councils. All secular literature had almost disappeared, and the thought of posterity seems to have vanished from the world.[473] Of the first half of the seventh century, however, and of the two centuries that preceded it, we have much information from [pg 236] Gregory of Tours, and Fredigarius, whose tedious and repulsive pages illustrate with considerable clearness the conflict of races and the dislocation of governments that for centuries existed. In Italy, the traditions and habits of the old Empire had in some degree reasserted their sway; but in Gaul the Church subsisted in the midst of barbarians, whose native vigour had never been emasculated by civilisation and refined by knowledge. The picture which Gregory of Tours gives us is that of a society which was almost absolutely anarchical. The mind is fatigued by the monotonous account of acts of violence and of fraud springing from no fixed policy, tending to no end, leaving no lasting impress upon the world.[474] The two queens Frédégonde and Brunehaut rise conspicuous above other figures for their fierce and undaunted ambition, for the fascination they exercised over the minds of multitudes, and for the number and atrocity of their crimes. All classes seem to have been almost equally tainted with vice. We read of a bishop named Cautinus, who had to be carried, when intoxicated, by four men from the table;[475] who, upon [pg 237] the refusal of one of his priests to surrender some private property, deliberately ordered that priest to be buried alive, and who, when the victim, escaping by a happy chance from the sepulchre in which he had been immured, revealed the crime, received no greater punishment than a censure.[476] The worst sovereigns found flatterers or agents in ecclesiastics. Frédégonde deputed two clerks to murder Childebert,[477] and another clerk to murder Brunehaut;[478] she caused a bishop of Rouen to be assassinated at the altar—a bishop and an archdeacon being her accomplices;[479] and she found in another bishop, named Ægidius, one of her most devoted instruments and friends.[480] The pope, St. Gregory the Great, was an ardent flatterer of Brunehaut.[481] Gundebald, having murdered his three brothers, was consoled by St. Avitus, the bishop of Vienne, who, without intimating the slightest disapprobation of the act, assured him that by removing his rivals he had been a providential agent in preserving the happiness of his people.[482] The bishoprics were filled by men of notorious debauchery, or by grasping misers.[483] The priests sometimes celebrated the sacred mysteries “gorged with food and dull with wine.”[484] They had already begun to carry arms, and Gregory tells of two bishops of the sixth century [pg 238] who had killed many enemies with their own hands.[485] There was scarcely a reign that was not marked by some atrocious domestic tragedy. There were few sovereigns who were not guilty of at least one deliberate murder. Never, perhaps, was the infliction of mutilation, and prolonged and agonising forms of death, more common. We read, among other atrocities, of a bishop being driven to a distant place of exile upon a bed of thorns;[486] of a king burning together his rebellious son, his daughter-in-law, and their daughters;[487] of a queen condemning a daughter she had had by a former marriage to be drowned, lest her beauty should excite the passions of her husband;[488] of another queen endeavouring to strangle her daughter with her own hands;[489] of an abbot, compelling a poor man to abandon his house, that he might commit adultery with his wife, and being murdered, together with his partner, in the act;[490] of a prince who made it an habitual amusement to torture his slaves with fire, and who buried two of them alive, because they had married without his permission;[491] of a bishop's wife, who, besides other crimes, was accustomed to mutilate men and to torture women, by applying red-hot irons to the most sensitive parts of their bodies;[492] of great numbers who were deprived of their ears [pg 239] and noses, tortured through several days, and at last burnt alive or broken slowly on the wheel. Brunehaut, at the close of her long and in some respects great though guilty career, fell into the hands of Clotaire, and the old queen, having been subjected for three days to various kinds of torture, was led out on a camel for the derision of the army, and at last bound to the tail of a furious horse, and dashed to pieces in its course.[493]
And yet this age was, in a certain sense, eminently religious. All literature had become sacred. Heresy of every kind was rapidly expiring. The priests and monks had acquired enormous power, and their wealth was inordinately increasing.[494] Several sovereigns voluntarily abandoned their thrones for the monastic life.[495] The seventh century, which, together with the eighth, forms the darkest period of the dark ages, is famous in the hagiology as having produced more saints than any other century, except that of the martyrs.[496]
The manner in which events were regarded by historians was also exceedingly characteristic. Our principal authority, [pg 240] Gregory of Tours, was a bishop of great eminence, and a man of the most genuine piety, and of very strong affections.[497] He describes his work as a record “of the virtues of saints, and the disasters of nations;”[498] and the student who turns to his pages from those of the Pagan historians, is not more struck by the extreme prominence he gives to ecclesiastical events, than by the uniform manner in which he views all secular events in their religious aspect, as governed and directed by a special Providence. Yet, in questions where the difference between orthodoxy and heterodoxy is concerned, his ethics sometimes exhibit the most singular distortion. Of this, probably the most impressive example is the manner in which he has described the career of Clovis, the great representative of orthodoxy.[499] Having recounted the circumstances of his conversion, Gregory proceeds to tell us, with undisguised admiration, how that chieftain, as the first-fruits of his doctrine, professed to be grieved at seeing that part of Gaul was held by an Arian sovereign; how he accordingly resolved to invade and appropriate that territory; how, with admirable piety, he commanded his soldiers to abstain from all devastations when traversing the territory of St. Martin, and how several miracles attested the Divine approbation of the expedition. The war—which is the first of the long series of professedly religious wars that have been undertaken by Christians—was fully successful, and Clovis proceeded to direct his ambition to new fields. In his expedition against the Arians, he had found a faithful ally in his relative Sighebert, the old and infirm king of the Ripuarian Franks. Clovis now proceeded artfully to suggest to the son of Sighebert the advantages that son might obtain by his father's death. The hint was taken. Sighebert was murdered, and Clovis [pg 241] sent ambassadors to the parricide, professing a warm friendship, but with secret orders on the first opportunity to kill him. This being done, and the kingdom being left entirely without a head, Clovis proceeded to Cologne, the capital of Sighebert; he assembled the people, professed with much solemnity his horror of the tragedies that had taken place, and his complete innocence of all connection with them;[500] but suggested that, as they were now without a ruler, they should place themselves under his protection. The proposition was received with acclamation. The warriors elected him as their king, and thus, says the episcopal historian, “Clovis received the treasures and dominions of Sighebert, and added them to his own. Every day God caused his enemies to fall beneath his hand, and enlarged his kingdom, because he walked with a right heart before the Lord, and did the things that were pleasing in His sight.”[501] His ambition was, however, still unsated. He proceeded, in a succession of expeditions, to unite the whole of Gaul under his sceptre, invading, defeating, capturing, and slaying the lawful sovereigns, who were for the most part his own relations. Having secured himself against dangers from without, by killing all his relations, with the exception of his wife and children, he is reported to have lamented before his courtiers his isolation, declaring that he had no relations remaining in the world to assist him in his adversity; but this speech, Gregory assures us, was a stratagem; for the king desired to discover whether any possible pretender to the throne had escaped his knowledge and his [pg 242] sword. Soon after, he died, full of years and honours, and was buried in a cathedral which he had built.
Having recounted all these things with unmoved composure, Gregory of Tours requests his reader to permit him to pause, to draw the moral of the history. It is the admirable manner in which Providence guides all things for the benefit of those whose opinions concerning the Trinity are strictly orthodox. Having briefly referred to Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, and David, all of whom are said to have intimated the correct doctrine on this subject, and all of whom were exceedingly prosperous, he passes to more modern times. “Arius, the impious founder of the impious sect, his entrails having fallen out, passed into the flames of hell; but Hilary, the blessed defender of the undivided Trinity, though exiled on that account, found his country in Paradise. The King Clovis, who confessed the Trinity, and by its assistance crushed the heretics, extended his dominions through all Gaul. Alaric, who denied the Trinity, was deprived of his kingdom and his subjects, and, what was far worse, was punished in the future world.”[502]
It would be easy to cite other, though perhaps not quite such striking, instances of the degree in which the moral judgments of this unhappy age were distorted by superstition.[503] Questions of orthodoxy, or questions of fasting, appeared to the popular mind immeasurably more important than what [pg 243] we should now call the fundamental principles of right and wrong. A law of Charlemagne, and also a law of the Saxons, condemned to death any one who ate meat in Lent,[504] unless the priest was satisfied that it was a matter of absolute necessity. The moral enthusiasm of the age chiefly drove men to abandon their civic or domestic duties, to immure themselves in monasteries, and to waste their strength by prolonged and extravagant maceration.[505] Yet, in the midst of all this superstition, there can be no question that in some respects the religious agencies were operating for good. The monastic bodies that everywhere arose, formed secure asylums for the multitudes who had been persecuted by their enemies, constituted an invaluable counterpoise to the rude military forces of the time, familiarised the imagination of men with religious types that could hardly fail in some degree to soften the character, and led the way in most forms of peaceful labour. When men, filled with admiration at the reports of the sanctity and the miracles of some illustrious saint, made pilgrimages to behold him, and found him attired in the rude garb of a peasant, with thick shoes, and with a scythe on his shoulder, superintending the labours of the farmers,[506] or sitting in a small attic mending lamps,[507] whatever other benefit they might derive from the interview, they could scarcely fail to return with an increased sense of [pg 244] the dignity of labour. It was probably at this time as much for the benefit of the world as of the Church, that the ecclesiastical sanctuaries and estates should remain inviolate, and the numerous legends of Divine punishment having overtaken those who transgressed them,[508] attest the zeal with which the clergy sought to establish that inviolability. The great sanctity that was attached to holidays was also an important boon to the servile classes. The celebration of the first day of the week, in commemoration of the resurrection, and as a period of religious exercises, dates from the earliest age of the Church. The Christian festival was carefully distinguished from the Jewish Sabbath, with which it never appears to have been confounded till the close of the sixteenth century; but some Jewish converts, who considered the Jewish law to be still in force, observed both days. In general, however, the Christian festival alone was observed, and the Jewish Sabbatical obligation, as St. Paul most explicitly affirms, no longer rested upon the Christians. The grounds of the observance of Sunday were the manifest propriety and expediency of devoting a certain portion of time to devout exercises, the tradition which traced the sanctification of Sunday to apostolic times, and the right of the Church to appoint certain seasons to be kept holy by its members. When Christianity acquired an ascendancy in the Empire, its policy on this subject was manifested in one of the laws of Constantine, which, without making any direct reference to religious motives, ordered that, “on the day of the sun,” no servile work should be performed except [pg 245] agriculture, which, being dependent on the weather, could not, it was thought, be reasonably postponed. Theodosius took a step further, and suppressed the public spectacles on that day. During the centuries that immediately followed the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the clergy devoted themselves with great and praiseworthy zeal to the suppression of labour both on Sundays and on the other leading Church holidays. More than one law was made, forbidding all Sunday labour, and this prohibition was reiterated by Charlemagne in his Capitularies.[509] Several Councils made decrees on the subject,[510] and several legends were circulated, of men who had been afflicted miraculously with disease or with death, for having been guilty of this sin.[511] Although the moral side of religion was greatly degraded or forgotten, there was, as I have already intimated, one important exception. Charity was so interwoven with the superstitious parts of ecclesiastical teaching, that it continued to grow and nourish in the darkest period. Of the acts of Queen Bathilda, it is said we know nothing except her donations to the monasteries, and the charity with which she purchased slaves and captives, and released them or converted them into monks.[512] While many of the bishops were men of gross and scandalous vice, there were always some who laboured assiduously in the old episcopal vocation of protecting the oppressed, interceding for the captives, and opening their sanctuaries to the fugitives. St. Germanus, a bishop of Paris, [pg 246] near the close of the sixth century, was especially famous for his zeal in ransoming captives.[513] The fame he acquired was so great, that prisoners are said to have called upon him to assist them, in the interval between his death and his burial; and the body of the saint becoming miraculously heavy, it was found impossible to carry it to the grave till the captives had been released.[514] In the midst of the complete eclipse of all secular learning, in the midst of a reign of ignorance, imposture, and credulity which cannot be paralleled in history, there grew up a vast legendary literature, clustering around the form of the ascetic; and the lives of the saints, among very much that is grotesque, childish, and even immoral, contain some fragments of the purest and most touching religious poetry.[515]
But the chief title of the period we are considering, to the indulgence of posterity, lies in its missionary labours. The stream of missionaries which had at first flowed from Palestine and Italy began to flow from the West. The Irish monasteries furnished the earliest, and probably the most numerous, labourers in the field. A great portion of the north of England was converted by the Irish monks of Lindisfarne. The fame of St. Columbanus in Gaul, in Germany, and in Italy, for a time even balanced that of St. Benedict himself, and the school which he founded at Luxeuil became the great seminary for mediæval missionaries, while [pg 247] the monastery he planted at Bobbio continued to the present century. The Irish missionary, St. Gall, gave his name to a portion of Switzerland he had converted, and a crowd of other Irish missionaries penetrated to the remotest forests of Germany. The movement which began with St. Columba in the middle of the sixth century, was communicated to England and Gaul about a century later. Early in the eighth century it found a great leader in the Anglo-Saxon St. Boniface, who spread Christianity far and wide through Germany, and at once excited and disciplined an ardent enthusiasm, which appears to have attracted all that was morally best in the Church. During about three centuries, and while Europe had sunk into the most extreme moral, intellectual, and political degradation, a constant stream of missionaries poured forth from the monasteries, who spread the knowledge of the Cross and the seeds of a future civilisation through every land, from Lombardy to Sweden.[516]
On the whole, however, it would be difficult to exaggerate the superstition and the vice of the period between the dissolution of the Empire and the reign of Charlemagne. But in the midst of the chaos the elements of a new society may be detected, and we may already observe in embryo the movement which ultimately issued in the crusades, the feudal system, and chivalry. It is exclusively with the moral aspect of this movement that the present work is concerned, and I shall endeavour, in the remainder of this chapter, to describe and explain its incipient stages. It consisted of two parts—a fusion of Christianity with the [pg 248] military spirit, and an increasing reverence for secular rank.