A Treatise on Relics
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Title: A Treatise on Relics
Author: Jean Calvin
Translator: Count Valerian Krasinski
Release date: April 25, 2010 [eBook #32136]
Most recently updated: June 16, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32136
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TREATISE ON RELICS ***
A Treatise on Relics
By
John Calvin
Translated from the French Original
With An
Introductory Dissertation
On the Miraculous Images, as Well as Other Superstitions, of the Roman
Catholic and Russo-Greek Churches.
By the Late
Count Valerian Krasinski,
Author of “The Religious History of the Slavonic Nations,” etc.
Second Edition.
Edinburgh:
Johnstone, Hunter & Co.
1870
CONTENTS
Preface.
Preface To The Second Edition.
Introductory Dissertation.
Chapter I. Origin Of The Worship Of Relics And Images In The Christian
Church.
Chapter II. Compromise Of The Church With Paganism.
Chapter III. Position Of The First Christian Emperors Towards Paganism,
And Their Policy In This Respect.
Chapter IV. Infection Of The Christian Church By Pagan Ideas And
Practices During The Fourth And Fifth Centuries.
Chapter V. Reaction Against The Worship Of Images And Other
Superstitious Practices By The Iconoclast Emperors Of The East.
Chapter VI. Origin And Development Of The Pious Legends, Or Lives Of
Saints, During The Middle Ages.
Chapter VII. Analysis Of The Pagan Rites And Practices Which Have Been
Retained By The Roman Catholic As Well As The Græco-Russian Church.
Chapter VIII. Image-Worship And Other Superstitious Practices Of The
Graeco-Russian Church.
Calvin’s Treatise On Relics, With Notes By The Translator.
Postscript.
List Of Works Published By Johnstone, Hunter, & Co., Edinburgh.
Footnotes
PREFACE.
The Treatise on Relics by the great Reformer of Geneva is not so generally
known as it deserves, though at the time of its publication it enjoyed a
considerable popularity.(1) The probable reason of this is: the absurdity
of the relics described in the Treatise has since the Reformation
gradually become so obvious, that their exhibitors make as little noise as
possible about their miraculous wares, whose virtues are no longer
believed except by the most ignorant part of the population of countries
wherein the education of the inferior classes is neglected. And, indeed,
not only Protestants, but many enlightened Roman Catholics believed that
all the miracles of relics, images, and other superstitions with which
Christianity were infected during the times of mediæval ignorance would be
soon, by the progress of knowledge, consigned for ever to the oblivion of
the dark ages, and only recorded in the history of the aberrations of the
human mind, together with the superstitions of ancient Egypt, Greece, and
Rome. Unfortunately these hopes have not been realised, and are still
remaining amongst the _pia desideria_. The Roman Catholic reaction, which
commenced about half a century ago by works of a philosophical nature,
adapted to the wants of the most intellectual classes of society, has,
emboldened by success, gradually assumed a more and more material
tendency, and at length has begun to manifest itself by such results as
the exhibition of the holy coat at Treves, which produced a great noise
over all Germany,(2) the apparition of the Virgin at La Salette, the
winking Madonna of Rimini, and, what is perhaps more important than all,
the solemn installation of the relics of St Theodosia at Amiens; whilst
works of a description similar to the Life of St Francis of Assisi, by M.
Chavin de Malan, and the Lives of the English Saints, which I have
mentioned on pp. 113 and 115 of my Introduction are produced by writers of
considerable talent and learning. These are significant facts, and prove,
at all events, that in spite of the progress of intellect and knowledge,
which is the boast of our century, we seem to be fast returning to a state
of things similar to the time when Calvin wrote his Treatise. I therefore
believe that its reproduction in a new English translation will not be out
of date.
On the other side, the politico-religious system of aggression followed by
Russia has now taken such a rapid development, that the dangers which
threaten the liberties and civilization of Europe from that quarter have
become more imminent than those which may be apprehended from the Roman
Catholic reaction. Fortunately England and France have taken up arms
against the impious crusade proclaimed by the Imperial Pope of Russia. I
think that the term _impious_, which I am advisedly using on this
occasion, is by no means exaggerated; because, how can we otherwise
designate the proceedings adopted by the Czar for exciting the religious
fanaticism of the Russians, as, for instance, the letter of the Archbishop
of Georgia, addressed to that of Moscow, and published in the official
Gazette of St Petersburg, stating, on the authority of the Russian
General, Prince Bagration Mukhranski, that during an engagement between
the Russians and the Turks, which recently took place in Asia, the Blessed
Virgin appeared in the air and frightened the Turks to such a degree that
they took to flight!(3) I have developed this subject in the last chapter
of my Introduction, in order to show my readers the religious condition of
the Russian people, because I think that without it a knowledge of the
policy now followed by their Government cannot be well understood, or its
consequences fully appreciated.
EDINBURGH, _May 1854_.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
The valuable Dissertation which forms such a fitting commentary upon John
Calvin’s Treatise on Relics, was written by the late lamented author on
the eve of the Crimean War, in 1854. It has been out of print for several
years, but in these days of Popish assumption and claims to Infallibility,
it has been thought that a new edition would prove acceptable, and be
found useful in directing attention to the mummeries and absurdities
engrafted on the True Christian Faith, by the false and corrupt Church of
Rome.
EDINBURGH, _January 1870_.
INTRODUCTORY DISSERTATION.
Chapter I. Origin Of The Worship Of Relics And Images In The Christian
Church.
Hero-worship is innate to human nature, and it is founded on some of our
noblest feelings,—gratitude, love, and admiration.—but which, like all
other feelings, when uncontrolled by principle and reason, may easily
degenerate into the wildest exaggerations, and lead to most dangerous
consequences. It was by such an exaggeration of these noble feelings that
Paganism filled the Olympus with gods and demigods,—elevating to this rank
men who have often deserved the gratitude of their fellow-creatures, by
some signal services rendered to the community, or their admiration, by
having performed some deeds which required a more than usual degree of
mental and physical powers. The same cause obtained for the Christian
martyrs the gratitude and admiration of their fellow-Christians, and
finally converted them into a kind of demigods. This was more particularly
the case when the church began to be corrupted by her compromise with
Paganism, which having been baptized without being converted, rapidly
introduced into the Christian church, not only many of its rites and
ceremonies, but even its polytheism, with this difference, that the
divinities of Greece and Rome were replaced by Christian saints, many of
whom received the offices of their Pagan predecessors.(4) The church in
the beginning tolerated these abuses, as a temporary evil, but was
afterwards unable to remove them; and they became so strong, particularly
during the prevailing ignorance of the middle ages, that the church ended
by legalising, through her decrees, that at which she did nothing but wink
at first. I shall endeavour to give my readers a rapid sketch of the rise,
progress, and final establishment of the Pagan practices which not only
continue to prevail in the Western as well as in the Eastern church, but
have been of late, notwithstanding the boasted progress of intellect in
our days, manifested in as bold as successful a manner.
Nothing, indeed, can be more deserving of our admiration than the conduct
of the Christian martyrs, who cheerfully submitted to an ignominious
death, inflicted by the most atrocious torments, rather than deny their
faith even by the mere performance of an apparently insignificant rite of
Paganism. Their persecutors were often affected by seeing examples of an
heroic fortitude, such as they admired in a Scævola or a Regulus,
displayed not only by men, but by women, and even children, and became
converted to a faith which could inspire its confessors with such a
devotion to its tenets. It has been justly said that the blood of the
martyrs was the glory and the seed of the church, because the constancy of
her confessors has, perhaps, given her more converts than the eloquence
and learning of her doctors. It was, therefore, very natural that the
memory of those noble champions of Christianity should be held in great
veneration by their brethren in the faith. The bodies of the martyrs, or
their remnants, were always, whenever it was possible, purchased from
their judges or executioners, and decently buried by the Christians. The
day on which the martyr had suffered was generally marked in the registers
of his church, in order to commemorate this glorious event on its
anniversaries. These commemorations usually consisted in the eulogy of the
martyr, delivered in an assembly of the church, for the edification of the
faithful, the strengthening of the weak, and the stimulating of the
lukewarm, by setting before them the noble example of the above-mentioned
martyr. It was very natural that the objects of the commemoration received
on such an occasion the greatest praises, not unfrequently expressed in
the most exaggerated terms, but there was no question about invoking the
aid or intercession of the confessors whose example was thus held out for
the imitation of the church.
We know from the Acts that neither St Stephen, the first Christian martyr,
nor St James, who was killed by Herod, were invoked in any manner by the
apostolic church, because, had this been the case, the inspired writer of
this first record of the ancient church would not have omitted such an
important circumstance, having mentioned facts of much lesser consequence.
Had such a practice been in conformity with the apostolic doctrine, it
would have certainly been brought forward in the epistles of St Paul, or
in those of other apostles. There is also sufficient evidence that the
fathers of the primitive church knew nothing of the invocation, or any
other kind of worship rendered to departed saints. The limits of this
essay allow me not to adduce evidences of this fact, which may be
abundantly drawn from the writings of those fathers, and I shall content
myself with the following few but conclusive instances of this kind.
St Clement, bishop of Rome, who is supposed to have been instituted by St
Paul, and to be the same of whom he speaks in his Epistle to the
Philippians iv. 3, addressed a letter to the Corinthians on account of
certain dissensions by which their church was disturbed. He recommends to
them, with great praises, the Epistles of St Paul, who had suffered
martyrdom under Nero, but he does not say a word about invoking the aid or
intercession of the martyr, who was the founder of their church, and which
would have been most suitable on that occasion, if such a practice had
already been admitted by the Christians of his time. On the contrary, he
prays God for them, “_because it is He who gives to the soul that invokes
Him, faith, grace, peace, patience, and wisdom_.” St Polycarp, bishop of
Smyrna, who lived in the second century, addressed a letter to the
Philippians, but he says nothing in it to recommend the invocation of St
Paul, who was the founder of their church, and as such would have been
considered as its patron saint, had the worship of the saints been at that
time already introduced amongst the Christians. The most important and
positive proof that the primitive Christians, not only did not pay any
adoration to the martyrs, but decidedly rejected it, is the epistle which
was issued by the church of Smyrna after the martyrdom of its bishop, whom
I have just mentioned. It states that the Pagans had, at the instigation
of the Jews, closely watched the Christians, imagining that they would
endeavour to carry away the ashes of Polycarp in order to worship him
after his death, because these idolaters knew not that the Christians
cannot abandon Jesus Christ, _or worship any one else_. “_We worship_,”
says the same document, “_Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God_; but with
regard to the martyrs, the disciples of Christ and imitators of his
virtues, _we love them, as they deserve it, on account of the
unconquerable love which they had for their Master and King; and would to
God that we should become their disciples and partakers of their zeal_.”
I could multiply proofs of this kind without end, but I shall only
observe, that even in the fourth century the orthodox Christians
considered the worship of every created being as idolatry, because the
opponents of the Arians, who considered Jesus Christ as created and not
co-essential with God the Father, employed the following argument to
combat this dogma:—“If you consider Jesus Christ a created being, you
commit idolatry by worshipping him.”
Admiration is, however, akin to adoration, and it was no wonder that those
whose memory was constantly praised, and frequently in the most
exaggerated terms, gradually began to be considered as something more than
simple mortals, and treated accordingly. It was also very natural that
various objects which had belonged to the martyrs were carefully preserved
as interesting mementoes, since it is continually done with persons who
have acquired some kind of celebrity, and that this should be the case
with their bodies, which have often been embalmed. It is, however,
impossible, as Calvin has justly observed,(5) to preserve such objects
without honouring them in a certain manner, and this must soon degenerate
into adoration. This was the origin of the worship of relics, which went
on increasing in the same ratio as the purity of Christian doctrines was
giving way to the superstitions of Paganism.
The worship of images is intimately connected with that of the saints.
They were rejected by the primitive Christians; but St Irenæus, who lived
in the second century, relates that there was a sect of heretics, the
Carpocratians, who worshipped, in the manner of Pagans, different images
representing Jesus Christ, St Paul, and others. The Gnostics had also
images; but the church rejected their use in a positive manner, and a
Christian writer of the third century, Minutius Felix, says that “the
Pagans reproached the Christians for having neither temples nor
simulachres;” and I could quote many other evidences that the primitive
Christians entertained a great horror against every kind of images,
considering them as the work of demons.
It appears, however, that the use of pictures was creeping into the church
already in the third century, because the council of Elvira in Spain, held
in 305, especially forbids to have any picture in the Christian churches.
These pictures were generally representations of some events, either of
the New or of the Old Testament, and their object was to instruct the
common and illiterate people in sacred history, whilst others were
emblems, representing some ideas connected with the doctrines of
Christianity. It was certainly a powerful means of producing an impression
upon the senses and the imagination of the vulgar, who believe without
reasoning, and admit without reflection; it was also the most easy way of
converting rude and ignorant nations, because, looking constantly on the
representations of some fact, people usually end by believing it. This
iconographic teaching was, therefore, recommended by the rulers of the
church, as being useful to the ignorant, who had only the understanding of
eyes, and could not read writings.(6) Such a practice was, however,
fraught with the greatest danger, as experience has but too much proved.
It was replacing intellect by sight.(7) Instead of elevating man towards
God, it was bringing down the Deity to the level of his finite intellect,
and it could not but powerfully contribute to the rapid spread of a pagan
anthropomorphism in the church.
There was also another cause which seems to have greatly contributed to
the propagation of the abovementioned anthropomorphism amongst the
Christians, namely, the contemplative life of the hermits, particularly of
those who inhabited the burning deserts of Egypt. It has been observed of
these monks, by Zimmerman, in his celebrated work on Solitude, that “men
of extraordinary characters, and actuated by strange and uncommon
passions, have shrunk from the pleasures of the world into joyless gloom
and desolation. In savage and dreary deserts they have lived a solitary
and destitute life, subjecting themselves to voluntary self-denials and
mortifications almost incredible; sometimes exposed in nakedness to the
chilling blasts of the winter cold, or the scorching breath of summer’s
heat, till their brains, distempered by the joint operation of tortured
senses and overstrained imagination, swarmed with the wildest and most
frantic visions.”(8) The same writer relates, on the authority of
Sulpicius Severus, that an individual had been roving about Mount Sinai
nearly during fifty years, entirely naked, and avoiding all intercourse
with men. Once, however, being inquired about the motives of his strange
conduct, he answered, that, “enjoying as he did the society of seraphim
and cherubim, he felt aversion to intercourse with men.”(9)
Many of these enthusiasts imagined, in their hallucinations, they had a
direct intercourse with God himself, who, as well as the subordinate
spirits, appeared to them in a human shape. The monks of Egypt were,
indeed, the most zealous defenders of the corporeality of God. They
violently hated Origines for his maintaining that He was spiritual.
Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, opposed this error; but the monks
assembled in great force, with the intention of murdering him; and he
escaped this danger by addressing them in the words which Jacob used to
Esau, “I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God.”—(Gen.
xxxiii 10.) This compliment, which could be interpreted as an
acknowledgment of a corporeal God, appeased the wrath of the monks, but
they compelled Theophilus to anathematise the writings of Origines.
The following anecdote is characteristic of the strong tendency of human
nature towards anthropomorphism. An old monk, called Serapion, having been
convinced by the arguments of a friend that it was an error to believe God
corporeal, exclaimed, weeping, “Alas, my God was taken from me, and I do
not know whom I am now worshipping!”(10) I shall have, in the course of
this essay, opportunities to show that the monks have always been the most
zealous and efficient promoters of image-worship.
The following rapid sketch of the introduction of image-worship into the
Christian church, and of its consequences, has been drawn by a French
living writer, whose religious views I do not share, but whose profound
erudition, fairness, and sincerity, are deserving of the greatest praise:—
“The aversion of the first Christians to the images, inspired by the Pagan
simulachres, made room, during the centuries which followed the period of
the persecutions, to a feeling of an entirely different kind, and the
images gradually gained their favour. Reappearing at the end of the fourth
and during the course of the fifth centuries, simply as emblems, they soon
became images, in the true acceptation of this word; and the respect which
was entertained by the Christians for the persons and ideas represented by
those images, was afterwards converted into a real worship.
Representations of the sufferings which the Christians had endured for the
sake of their religion, were at first exhibited to the people in order to
stimulate by such a sight the faith of the masses, always lukewarm and
indifferent. With regard to the images of divine persons of entirely
immaterial beings, it must be remarked, that they did not originate from
the most spiritualised and pure doctrines of the Christian society, but
were rejected by the severe orthodoxy of the primitive church. These
simulachres appear to have been spread at first by the Gnostics,—_i.e._,
by those Christian sects which adopted the most of the beliefs of Persia
and India. Thus it was a Christianity which was not purified by its
contact with the school of Plato,—a Christianity which entirely rejected
the Mosaic tradition, in order to attach itself to the most strange and
attractive myths of Persia and India,—that gave birth to the images. And
it was a return to the spiritualism of the first ages, and a revival of
the spirit of aversion to what has a tendency of lowering Divinity to the
narrow proportions of a human creature, that produced war against those
images. But the manners and the beliefs had been changed. Whole nations
had received Christianity, when it was already escorted by that idolatrous
train of carved and painted images. Only those populations amongst whom
the ancient traditions were preserved could favour this reaction. The
clergy were, moreover, interested in maintaining one of their most
powerful means of teaching. The long and persevering efforts of the
Iconoclasts proved therefore ineffective; and the Waldenses were not more
fortunate. Wickliffe, the Hussites, and Carlostad, attacked the images;
but it was reserved only to the Calvinists to establish in some parts of
Europe the triumph of the ideas of the Iconoclasts. The shock was
terrible. The Religionists frequently committed acts of a fanatical and
senseless vandalism; and art had many losses to deplore. But the
idolatrous tendency was struck at its very root; and Catholicism itself
found, after the struggle, more purity and idealism in its own
worship.(11) The Reformed perceived afterwards the exaggeration of their
principles; and though they continued to defend the entrance of their
temples to the simulachres, condemned by God on Mount Sinai, they spared
those which had been bequeathed by the less severe and more material faith
of their fathers.”(12)
The principal cause of the corruption of the Christian church, by the
introduction of the Pagan ideas and practices alluded to above, was,
however, chiefly the lamentable policy of compromise with Paganism which
that church adopted soon after her sudden triumph by the conversion of
Constantine. The object of this policy was to lead into her pale the
Pagans as rapidly as possible; and, therefore, instead of making them
enter by the strait gate, she widened it in such a manner, that the rush
of Paganism had almost driven Christianity out of her pale. The example of
the emperors, who, professing Christianity, were, or considered themselves
to be, obliged, by the necessities of their position, to act on some
occasions as Pagans, may have been not without influence on the church. I
shall endeavour to develop this important subject in the following
chapters; and, in order to remove every suspicion of partiality, I shall
do it almost entirely on the authority of an eminent Roman Catholic writer
of our day.
Chapter II. Compromise Of The Church With Paganism.
I have described, in the preceding chapter, the causes which made
Christian worship gradually to deviate from its primitive purity, and to
assume a character more adapted to the ideas of the heathen
population,—numbers of whom were continually joining the church. It was,
particularly since the time of Constantine, because its festivals,
becoming every day more numerous, and its sanctuaries more solemn,
spacious, and adorned with greater splendour,—its ceremonies more
complicated,—its emblems more diversified,—offered to the Pagans an ample
compensation for the artistic pomp of their ancient worship. “The
frankincense,” says an eminent Roman Catholic writer of our time, “the
flowers, the golden and silver vessels, the lamps, the crowns, the
luminaries, the linen, the silk, the chaunts, the processions, the
festivals, recurring at certain fixed days, passed from the vanquished
altars to the triumphant one. Paganism tried to borrow from Christianity
its dogmas and its morals; Christianity took from Paganism its
ornaments.”(13) Christianity would have become triumphant without these
transformations. It would have done it later than it did, but its triumph
would have been of a different kind from that which it has obtained by the
assistance of these auxiliaries. “Christianity,” says the author quoted
above, “_retrograded_; but it was this which made its force.” It would be
more correct to say, that it advanced its external progress at the expence
of its purity; it gained thus the favour of the crowd, but it was by other
means that it obtained the approbation of the cultivated minds.(14)
The church made a compromise with Paganism in order to convert more easily
its adherents,—forgetting the precepts of the apostle, to beware of
philosophy and vain traditions, (Col. ii. 8,) as well as to refuse profane
and old wives’ fables, (1 Tim. iv. 7.) And it cannot be doubted that St
Paul knew well that a toleration of these things would have rapidly
extended the new churches, had the quantity of the converts been more
important than the quality of their belief and morals.
This subject has been amply developed by one of the most distinguished
French writers of our day, who, belonging himself to the Roman Catholic
Church, seeks to justify her conduct in this respect, though he admits
with the greatest sincerity that she had introduced into her polity a
large share of Pagan elements. I shall give my readers this curious piece
of special pleading in favour of the line of policy which the church had
followed on that occasion, as it forms a precious document, proving, in an
unanswerable manner, the extent of Pagan rites and ideas contained in the
Roman Catholic Church, particularly as it proceeds, not from an opponent
of that church, but from a dutiful son of hers. The work from which I am
making this extract is, moreover, considered as one of the master-pieces
of modern French literature, and it was crowned by one of the most learned
bodies of Europe—the _Academie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres_ of
Paris.(15)
“The fundamental idea of Christianity,” says our author, “was a new,
powerful idea, and independent of all those by which it had been preceded.
However, the men by whom the Christian system was extended and developed,
having been formed in the school of Paganism, could not resist the desire
of connecting it with the former systems. St Justin, St Clement (of
Alexandria), Athenagoras, Tatian, Origenes, Synesius, &c., considered
Pagan philosophy as a preparation to Christianity. It was, indeed, making
a large concession to the spirit of the ancient times; but they believed
that they could conceal its inconveniences by maintaining in all its
purity the form of Christian worship, and rejecting with disdain the
usages and ceremonies of polytheism. When Christianity became the dominant
religion, its doctors perceived that they would be compelled to give way
equally in respect to the external form of worship, and that they would
not be sufficiently strong to constrain the multitude of Pagans, who were
embracing Christianity with a kind of enthusiasm as unreasoning as it was
of little duration, to forget a system of acts, ceremonies, and festivals,
which had such an immense power over their ideas and manners. The church
admitted, therefore, into her discipline, many usages evidently pagan. She
undoubtedly has endeavoured to purify them, but she never could obliterate
the impression of their original stamp.
“This new spirit of Christianity—this eclectism, which extended even to
material things—has in modern times given rise to passionate discussions;
these borrowings from the old religion were condemned, as having been
suggested to the Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries by the
remnants of that old love of idolatry which was lurking at the bottom of
their hearts. It was easy for the modern reformers to condemn, by an
unjust blame, the leaders of the church; they should, however, have
acknowledged, that the principal interest of Christianity was to wrest
from error the greatest number of its partisans, and that it was
impossible to attain this object without providing for the obstinate
adherents of the false gods an easy passage from the temple to the church.
If we consider that, notwithstanding all these concessions, the ruin of
Paganism was accomplished only by degrees and imperceptibly,—that during
more than two centuries it was necessary to combat, over the whole of
Europe, an error which, although continually overthrown, was incessantly
rising again,—we shall understand that the conciliatory spirit of the
leaders of the church was true wisdom.
“St John Chrysostom says, that the devil, having perceived that he could
gain nothing with the Christians by pushing them in a direct way into
idolatry, adopted for the purpose an indirect one.(16) If the devil, that
is to say, the pagan spirit, was changing its plan of attack, the church
was also obliged to modify her system of defence, and not to affect an
inflexibility which would have kept from her a great number of people
whose irresolute conscience was fluctuating between falsehood and truth.
“Already, at the beginning of the fifth century, some haughty spirits,
Christians who were making a display of the rigidity of their virtues, and
who were raising an outcry against the profanation of holy things, began
to preach a pretended reform; they were recalling the Christians to the
apostolic doctrine; they demanded what they were calling a true
Christianity. Vigilantius, a Spanish priest, sustained on this subject an
animated contest with St Jerome. He opposed the worship of the saints and
the custom of placing candles on their sepulchres; he condemned, as a
source of scandal, the vigils in the basilics of the martyrs,(17) and many
other usages, which were, it is true, derived from the ancient worship. We
may judge by the warmth with which St Jerome refuted the doctrines of this
heresiarch of the importance which he attached to those usages.(18) He
foresaw that the mission of the Christian doctrine would be to adapt
itself to the manners of all times, and to oppose them only when they
would tend towards depravity. Far from desiring to deprive the Romans of
certain ceremonial practices which were dear to them, and whose influence
had nothing dangerous to the Christian dogmas, he openly took their part,
and his conduct was approved by the whole church.
“If St Jerome and St Augustinus had shared the opinions of Vigilantius,
would they have had the necessary power successfully to oppose the
introduction of pagan usages into the ceremonies of the Christian church?
I don’t believe that they would. After the fall of Rome, whole populations
passed under the standards of Christianity, but they did it with their
baggage of senseless beliefs and superstitious practices. The church could
not repulse this crowd of self-styled Christians, and still less summon
them immediately to abandon all their ancient errors; she therefore made
concessions to circumstances, concessions which were not entirely
voluntary. They may be considered as calculations full of wisdom on the
part of the leaders of the church, as well as the consequence of that kind
of irruption which was made at the beginning of the fifth century into the
Christian society by populations, who, notwithstanding their abjuration,
were Pagans by their manners, their tastes, their prejudices, and their
ignorance.(19)
“Let us now calculate the extent of these concessions, and examine whether
it was right to say that they injured the purity of the Christian dogmas.
“The Romans had derived from their religion an excessive love of public
festivals. They were unable to conceive a worship without the pompous
apparel of ceremonies. They considered the long processions, the
harmonious chaunts, the splendour of dresses, the light of tapers, the
perfume of frankincense, as the essential part of religion. Christianity,
far from opposing a disposition which required only to be directed with
more wisdom, adopted a part of the ceremonial system of the ancient
worship. It changed the object of its ceremonies, it cleansed them from
their old impurities, but it preserved the days upon which many of them
were celebrated, and the multitude found thus in the new religion, as much
as in the old one, the means of satisfying its dominant passion.(20)
“The neophytes felt for the pagan temples an involuntary respect. They
could not pass at once from veneration to a contempt for the monuments of
their ancestors’ piety; and in ascending the steps of the church, they
were casting a longing look on those temples which a short time before had
been resplendent with magnificence, but were now deserted. Christianity
understood the power of this feeling, and desired to appropriate it to its
own service; it consented, therefore, to establish the solemnities of its
worship in the edifices which it had disdained for a long time.(21) Its
care not to offend pagan habits was such, that it often respected even the
pagan names of those edifices.(22) In short, its policy, which, since the
times of Constantine, was always to facilitate the conversion of the
Pagans, assumed, after the fall of Rome, a more decided character, and the
system of useful concessions became general in all the churches of Europe;
and it cannot be doubted that its results have been favourable to the
propagation of Christian ideas.(23)
“There is, moreover, a peculiar cause to which the rapid decline of the
pagan doctrines in the west must be ascribed, and I shall endeavour to
place this powerful cause in its true light, carefully avoiding mixing up
with a subject of this importance all considerations foreign to the object
of my researches.
“Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, after having defended a long time
the true faith, strayed from it on a subject which proved a
stumbling-stone to so many theologians—I mean, the nature of Jesus Christ.
Nestorius distinguished in the Son of God two natures, a divine and a
human one; and he maintained that the Virgin Mary was not the mother of
God (Θεοτοκος), but the mother of the man (ἀνθρωποτοκος). This doctrine,
which was a new and bolder form given to Arianism, spread in the two
empires, and gained a great number of partisans amongst the monasteries of
Egypt. Many monks could not almost suffer that Jesus Christ should be
acknowledged as God, and considered him only as an instrument of the
Divinity, or a vessel which bore it (Θεοφορος).
“The celebrated St Cyrillus, bishop of Alexandria, wrote an epistle to
those monks, in order to call them back to respect for the traditions
established in the church, if not by the apostles—who, in speaking of the
holy virgin, never made use of the expression, _mother of God_—at least by
the fathers who succeeded them. The quarrel became general and violent;
the Christians came to blows everywhere. Nestorius seemingly wished to
draw back, being frightened by the storm which he had himself raised. ‘I
have found,’ said he, ‘the church a prey to dissensions. Some call the
holy virgin the _mother of God_; others only the _mother of a man_. In
order to reunite them, I have called her the _mother of Christ_. Remain,
therefore, at peace about this question, and be convinced that my
sentiments on the true faith are always the same.’ But his obstinacy and
the ardour of his partisans did not allow him to go beyond this false
retraction. The necessity of a general council was felt, and the Emperor
Theodosius II. ordered in 431 its convocation at Ephesus. On the 21st June
431, two hundred bishops condemned Nestorius, and declared that the Virgin
Mary should be honoured as the _mother of God_. This decision was
accepted, notwithstanding some vain protestations, by the universal
church. The fathers of the council of Ephesus had no thought of
introducing into the church a new dogma or worship. The Virgin Mary had
always been considered by them as the _mother of God_, and they made now a
solemn declaration of this belief, in order to reply to the attack of
Nestorius, and to remove every incertitude about a dogma which had not
hitherto been opposed. But these great assemblies of Christians,
notwithstanding the particular motive of their meeting, were always
produced by some general necessity which was felt by the Christian
society, and the results of their decrees went often beyond the provisions
of those by whom they were framed.
“Though I am far from believing that it is allowable to weigh in the
scales of human reason the dogmas of Christianity, I do not think that it
is prohibited to examine which of these dogmas has been the most
instrumental in detaching the Pagans from their errors.
“We have several times penetrated, in the course of our researches, into
the conscience of the leaders of Paganism, and we have always found that
it was entirely under the influence of political views and interests.
These interests, which so powerfully acted upon the politician’s mind, had
but a feeble hold upon that of the inhabitants of the country. And,
indeed, what interest could the agriculturists, the artisans, and the
proletarians, have in maintaining the integrity of the Roman constitution,
or in preserving the rights of the senate, as well as the privileges,
honours, and riches of the aristocracy? Being destined, as they were under
any religion whatever, for a life of labour and privation, they might
choose between Christianity and Paganism, without having their choice
actuated by any personal interest. It is therefore necessary to seek for
another cause of that obstinate attachment which the lower classes of the
town and country population showed for the practices of a worship whose
existence was for a century reduced to such a miserable state.
“I shall not dwell on what has been said about the tyranny of habit, which
is always more severe wherever minds are less enlightened. I shall
indicate another cause of the obstinacy of the Pagans, which was founded
at least upon an operation of the mind—upon a judgment—and was,
consequently, more deserving of fixing the attention of the church than
that respect of custom against which the weapons of reason are powerless.
“The Christian dogmas, penetrating into a soul corrupted and weakened by
idolatry, must have, in the first moment, filled it with a kind of terror.
And, indeed, how was it possible that the Pagans, accustomed as they were
to their profligate gods and goddesses, should not have trembled when they
heard for the first time the voice of God, the just but inexorable
rewarder of good and evil? Should not a solemn and grave worship, whose
ceremonies were a constant and direct excitation to the practice of every
virtue, appear an intolerable yoke to men who were accustomed to find in
their sacred rites a legitimate occasion to indulge in every kind of
debauchery? The fear of submitting their lives to the rule of a too rigid
morality, and to bow their heads before a God whose greatness terrified
them, kept for many years a multitude of Pagans from the church.
“If it has entered the designs of Providence to temper the severe dogmas
of Christianity by the consecration of some mild, tender, and consoling
ideas, and by the same adapted to the fragile human nature, it is evident
that, whatever may have been their aim, they must have assisted in
detaching the last Pagans from their errors. The worship of Mary, the
mother of God, seems to have been the means which Providence has employed
for completing Christianity.(24)
“After the council of Ephesus the churches of the East and of the West
offered the worship of the faithful to the Virgin Mary, who had
victoriously issued from a violent attack. The nations were as if dazzled
by the image of this divine mother, who united in her person the two most
tender feelings of nature, the pudicity of the virgin and the love of the
mother; an emblem of mildness, of resignation, and of all that is sublime
in virtue; one who weeps with the afflicted, intercedes for the guilty,
and never appears otherwise than as the messenger of pardon or of
assistance. They accepted this new worship with an enthusiasm sometimes
too great, because with many Christians it became the whole Christianity.
The Pagans did not even try to defend their altars against the progress of
the worship of the mother of God; they opened to Mary the temples which
they kept closed to Jesus Christ, and confessed their defeat.(25) It is
true, that they often mixed with the worship of Mary those pagan ideas,
those vain practices, those ridiculous superstitions, from which they
seemed unable to detach themselves; but the church rejoiced, nevertheless,
at their entering into her pale, because she well knew that it would be
easy to her to purge of its alloy, with the help of time, a worship whose
essence was purity itself.(26) Thus, some prudent concessions, temporarily
made to the pagan manners and the worship of Mary, were two elements of
force which the church employed in order to conquer the resistance of the
last Pagans,—a resistance which was feeble enough in Italy, but violent
beyond the Alps.”(27)
Chapter III. Position Of The First Christian Emperors Towards Paganism,
And Their Policy In This Respect.
I have given in the preceding chapter a description, traced by one of the
most learned Roman Catholic writers of our day, of the compromise between
Christianity and Paganism, by which the church has endeavoured to
establish her dominion over the adherents of the latter. I shall now try
to give a rapid sketch of the circumstances which undoubtedly have
influenced the church, to a considerable degree, in the adoption of a line
of policy which, though it certainly has much contributed to the extension
of her external dominion, has introduced into her pale those very errors
and superstitions which it was her mission to destroy, and to deliver
mankind from their baneful influence.
There is a widely-spread but erroneous opinion, that the conversion of
Constantine was followed by an immediate destruction of Paganism in the
Roman empire. This opinion originated from the incorrect statements of
some ecclesiastical writers; but historical criticism has proved, beyond
every doubt, that, even a century after the conversion of that monarch,
Paganism was by no means extinct, and counted many adherents, even amongst
the highest classes of Roman society.
When Constantine proclaimed his conversion to the religion of the Cross,
its adherents formed but a minority of the population of the Roman
empire.(28) The deficiency of their numbers was, however, compensated by
their moral advantages; for they were united by the worship of the one
true God, and ardently devoted to a religion which they had voluntarily
embraced, and for which they had suffered so much. The Pagans were, on the
contrary, disunited, and in a great measure indifferent to a religion
whose doctrines were derided by the more enlightened of them, though,
considering it as a political institution necessary for the maintenance of
the empire, they often displayed great zeal in its defence. The Christians
of that time may be compared to the Greeks when they combated the Persians
on the field of Marathon and at Thermopylæ; but, alas! their victory under
Constantine proved as fatal to the purity of their religion as that of the
Greeks under Alexander to their political and military virtues. Both of
them became corrupted by adopting the ideas and manners of their conquered
adversaries.
Some writers have suspected that the conversion of Constantine was more
due to political than religious motives; but though great and many were
the faults of that monarch, his sincerity in embracing the Christian
religion cannot be doubted, because it was a step more contrary than
favourable to his political interests. The Christians formed, as I have
said above, only a minority of the population of the empire, and
particularly so in its western provinces. There was not a single Christian
in the Roman senate; and the aristocracy of Rome, whose privileges and
interests were intimately connected with the religious institutions of the
empire, were most zealous in their defence. The municipal bodies of the
principal cities were also blindly devoted to the national religion, whose
existence was considered by many as inseparable from that of the empire
itself; and these bodies were generally the chief promoters of those
terrible persecutions to which the Christians had been so many times
subjected. The Pagan clergy, rich, powerful, and numerous, were ever
zealous in exciting public hatred against the Christians; and the legions
were chiefly commanded by those officers who had united with Galerius in
compelling Diocletian to persecute the Christians. The capital of the
empire was the particular stronghold of the ancient creed. “Rome,” says
Beugnot, in the work from which I have so largely drawn, “was the cradle
and the focus of the national belief. Many traditions, elevated to the
rank of dogmas, were born within her pale, and impressed upon her a
religious character, which still was vividly shining in the times of
Constantine. The Pagans of the west considered Rome as the sacred city,
the sanctuary of their hopes, the point towards which all their thoughts
were to be directed; and the Greeks, in their usual exaggeration,
acknowledged in her, not a part of the earth, but of heaven.”—(_Libanii
Epistolæ_, epist. 1083, p. 816.) “The aristocracy, endowed with its many
sacerdotal dignities, and dragging in its train a crowd of clients and
freedmen, to whom it imparted its passions and its attachment to the
error, furnished, by the help of its immense riches, the means of
subsistence to a greedy, turbulent, and superstitious populace, amongst
whom it could easily maintain the most odious prejudices against
Christianity. The hope of acquiring a name, a fortune, or simply to take a
part in the public distributions, attracted to that city from the
provinces all those who had no condition, or, what is still worse, those
who were dissatisfied with theirs. Italy, Spain, Africa, and Gallia sent
to Rome the _elite_ of their children, in order to be instructed in a
school, the principal merit of whose professors was, an envious hatred of
every new idea, and who had acquired a melancholy reputation during the
persecutions of the Christians. The standard of Paganism was waving in
full liberty on the walls of the Capitol. Public and private sacrifices,
sacred games, and the consultation of the augurs, were prevailing to the
utmost in that _sink of all the superstitions_.(29) The name of Christ was
cursed, and the speedy ruin of his worshippers announced, in every part of
that place, whilst the glory of the gods was celebrated, and their
assistance invoked. How cruel must have been the situation of the
Christians, left in the midst of that city, where, at every step, a
temple, an altar, a statue, and horrible blasphemies were revealing to
them the ever active power of the Lie! They dared not either to found
churches, to open schools, or even publicly to reply to what was spoken
against them, at the theatres, at the forum, or at the baths: so that they
seemed to exist at Rome only in order to give a greater _eclat_ to the
dominion of idolatry.”—(Vol. i., p. 75.) It was no wonder that such a
religious disposition of Rome had placed it in a continual and strenuous
opposition to Constantine, and his Christian successors; and this
circumstance may be considered as an additional motive which induced
Constantine to transfer the capital of the empire from Rome to Byzantium,
though this measure may have been chiefly brought about by political
considerations. In removing his residence to a more central point of the
empire, he at the same time drew nearer to the eastern provinces, where
Christianity had many devoted adherents. Constantinople became the capital
of the Christian party, whence it gradually developed its sway over the
other parts of the empire, but the Pagans maintained meanwhile their
ground at Rome, in such a manner, that it seems to have been uninhabitable
to the Christian emperors; because we see even those of them who ruled the
western provinces fixing their residence either at Milan or Ravenna, and
visiting only on some occasions the city of the Cæsars, which had become,
since the foundation of Constantinople, the fortified camp of
Paganism.(30)
Constantine proclaimed full religious liberty to all his subjects. This
measure, dictated by a sound policy, and in perfect harmony with the true
spirit of his new religion, was not, however, sufficient to relieve him
from the difficulties of his personal position, as he united in his person
two characters diametrically opposed one to another. Being a Christian, he
was at the same time, as the emperor of Rome, the head and the
representant, not only of its political, but also of its religious
institutions. This circumstance forced him into a double line of policy,
which I shall describe in the words of M. Beugnot:—
“There were in Constantine, so to say, two persons,—the Christian and the
emperor. If that monarch had not been endowed with a rare intellect, he
would have, by confounding these two characters, raised in his way
obstacles which he could not overcome. As a Christian, he showed
everywhere his contempt for the vain superstitions of the ancient worship,
and his enthusiasm for the new ideas. He conferred with the bishops; he
assisted _standing_ at their long homilies; he presided at the councils;
he deeply meditated the mysteries of Christianity; and he struggled
against the heresiarchs with the ardour of a Christian soldier and the
grief of a profoundly convinced soul. As emperor, he submitted to the
necessities of a difficult position, and conformed, in all grave matters,
to the manners and beliefs which he did not feel sufficiently strong
openly to shock. On endowing the purple, he became the heir of that long
series of emperors who had all remained faithful to the worship of the
father-land; and he wrapt himself, so to say, in the ancient traditions
and recollections of pagan Rome; for it was an inheritance which he could
not renounce, without danger to himself as well as to the empire.
“When we observe some actions of Constantine, evidently tinged with
Paganism, we must consider less their external form than the relation in
which they stood towards the constitution of Rome, which that emperor had
no desire to destroy. We shall then become convinced that his conduct was
the result of necessity, and not that of a crooked policy. As an
individual, he was free; as an emperor, he was a slave; and his greatest
merit, according to our opinion, was to have soundly judged the
embarrassments of this situation. Animated as he was with a lively zeal
for the truths of Christianity, it was very natural that he should employ
the imperial power in order to break down all the obstacles to its
progress. But this would have involved him in an open war with a nation,
the majority of whom were composed of Pagans; and it is very likely that
he would have succumbed in such a contest. He understood this; and it
prevented him giving way to the entreaties, and even complaints, of
over-zealous Christians.”—Vol. i., p. 88.
Constantine was, notwithstanding his conversion to Christianity, the
supreme pontiff of pagan Rome. The title of this dignity was given him on
the public monuments, and he performed its functions on several occasions;
as, for instance, in 321, several years after his conversion, he wrote to
Maximus, prefect of Rome, as follows:—
“If our palace or any public monument shall be struck by lightning, the
auguries are to be consulted, according to the ancient rites (_retento
more veteris observantiæ_), in order to know what this event indicates;
and the accounts of these proceedings are immediately to be sent to us.
Private individuals may make similar consultations, provided they abstain
from secret sacrifices, which are particularly prohibited. With regard to
the accounts stating that the amphitheatre was recently struck by
lightning, and which thou hast sent to Heraclianus the tribune, and master
of offices, know that they must be delivered to us.”
This is undoubtedly a very strange document for a Christian monarch, who
officially commands to consult the Pagan oracles, and, as its concluding
words seem to imply, is anxious to maintain, on similar occasions, his
rights as the supreme pontiff of Paganism.
It was also in his quality of supreme pontiff that Constantine instituted,
soon after his accession, the Francic games, for the commemoration of his
victory over the Franks, and which were celebrated, during a considerable
time, on the 18th of the kalends of August; and, in 321, the Sarmatic
games, on the occasion of his victory over the Sarmatians, and celebrated
on the 6th of the same month. These games were real Pagan ceremonies, and
reprobated on this account by the Christian writers of that time.(31)
I could quote other instances of a similar kind; but I shall conclude this
subject by observing, that a medal has been preserved, upon which
Constantine is represented in the dress of the supreme pontiff,—_i.e._,
with a veil covering his head.
Constantine was, indeed, very anxious not to offend the Pagan party. In
319 he published a very severe law against the soothsayers; expressing,
however, that this prohibition did not extend to the public consultations
of the _Haruspices_, according to the established rites. And a short time
afterwards he proclaimed another law on the same subject, in which he
still more explicitly declares that he does not interfere with the rites
of the Pagan worship.(32)
It must be observed, that the Romans, as well as the Greeks, had two kinds
of divination: the public, which were considered as legitimate; and the
secret, which were generally forbidden. This last had been prohibited by
some former emperors; and the laws of the Twelve Tables declared them
punishable with death. Constantine seems to have been very anxious that
his intention on this subject should not be mistaken; and he published in
321 an edict, by which he positively allows the practice of a certain kind
of magic, by the following remarkable expressions:—
“It is right to repress and to punish, by laws justly severe, those who
practise, or try to practise, the magical arts, and seek to seduce pure
souls into profligacy; but those who employ this art in order to find
remedies against diseases, or who, in the country, make use of it in order
to prevent the snow, the wind, and the hail from destroying the crops,
must not be prosecuted. Neither the welfare nor the reputation of any one
are endangered by acts whose object is to insure to men the benefits of
the _divinity_ and the fruits of their labour.”—_Codex Theodosianus_, lib.
ix., f. 16, _apud_ Beugnot.
This was, undoubtedly, a very large concession to the superstitions of
Paganism made by a Christian monarch, and from which he was, perhaps,
himself not entirely free. It is well known that Constantine, after his
public declaration of Christianity, introduced the _labarum_,(33) as a
sign of the dominion of the new faith; but it was generally placed on his
coins in the hands of the winged statue of the Pagan goddess of Victory.
Besides these coins of Constantine, there are many others of the same
monarch, having inscriptions in honour of Jupiter, Mars, and other Pagan
divinities. The Pagan aristocracy of Rome seem to have been resolved to
ignore the fact that the head of the empire had become a Christian, and to
consider him, in spite of himself, as one of their own. Thus, after his
death, the senate placed him, according to the usual custom, among the
gods; and a calendar has been preserved where the festivals in honour of
this strange divinity are indicated. The name of _Divus_ is given to him
on several coins; and, what is very odd, this Pagan god is represented on
the above-mentioned medals holding in his hand the Christian sign of the
_labarum_.
We thus see that Constantine, instead of persecuting the adherents of the
national Paganism, was following a policy of compromise between the two
characters united in his person, that of a Christian and of a Roman
emperor. This did not, however, prevent him from heaping favours of every
kind upon the Christian church,—favours which proved to her much more
injurious than all the persecutions of the former emperors. And, indeed,
the Christians, who had nobly stood the test of adversity, were not proof
against the more dangerous trial of a sudden and unexpected prosperity.
The first favour granted by Constantine to the Christians, and which he
did even before his public confession of their faith, was the extension to
their clergy of the exemption from various municipal charges enjoyed by
the Pagan priests, on account of their being obliged to give at their
expense certain public games. The Christian clergy were thus placed in a
more favourable position than the Pagan priests, because, though admitted
to equal immunities, they were not subjected to the same charges; and
thus, for the first time, a bribe was offered for conversion to a religion
which had hitherto generally exposed its disciples to persecution.
“Numbers of people, actuated less by conviction than by the hope of a
reward, were crowding from all parts to the churches, and the first favour
granted to the Christians introduced amongst them guilty passions, to
which they had hitherto remained strangers, and whose action was so rapid
and so melancholy. The complaints of the municipal bodies, and the
disorder which it was producing in the provincial administration, induced
Constantine to put some restrictions on a favour which, being granted
perhaps somewhat inconsiderately, did more harm than good to the interests
of the Christian religion.”—_Beugnot_, vol. i., p. 78.
Constantine increased his favours to the Christians after he had publicly
embraced their faith. “The ecclesiastical historians,” says the author
whom I have just quoted, “enumerate with a feeling of pride the proofs of
his generosity. They say, that the revenues of the empire were employed to
erect everywhere magnificent churches, and to enrich the bishops. They
cannot be, on this occasion, accused of exaggeration. Constantine
introduced amongst the Christians a taste for riches and luxury; and the
disappearance of their frugal and simple manners, which had been the glory
of the church during the three preceding centuries, may be dated from his
reign.”—_Ibid._, p. 87.
The ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, a great admirer of Constantine,
whose personal friend he was, admits himself, that the favours shown by
that monarch to the church have not been always conducive to her purity.
In short, the sudden triumph of the church under Constantine was one of
the principal causes of her corruption, and the beginning of that
compromise with Paganism, described in the preceding chapter. Paganism,
though weakened through its abandonment by the head of the state, was by
no means broken down at the time of Constantine’s death. Many of its
zealous adherents were occupying the principal dignities of the state, as
well as the most important civil and military offices; but its chief
stronghold was Rome, where its partisans were so powerful, that the
unfortunate dissensions which divided the Christians were publicly exposed
to ridicule in the theatres of that city. The Arian writer Philostorgus
says that Constantine was worshipped after his death, not as a saint, but
as a god, by the orthodox Christians, who offered sacrifices to the statue
of that monarch placed upon a column of porphyry, and addressed prayers to
him as to God himself. It is impossible to ascertain whether examples of
such mad extravagance had ever taken place amongst Christians or not; but
the Western church has not bestowed upon his memory the honours of
saintship, though she has been generally very lavish of them.(34) Thus the
first Christian emperor was canonised only by the Pagans.
The sons of Constantine followed the religious policy of their father; and
the facility with which his nephew, Julian the Apostate, had restored
Paganism to the rank of the dominant religion, twenty-four years after his
death, proves how strong its party was even at that time. Julian’s reign
of eighteen months was too short to produce any considerable effect upon
the religious parties into which the Roman empire was then divided. After
his death, the imperial crown was offered by the army to Sallust, a Pagan
general, who having refused it on account of his great age, it was
bestowed upon Jovian, a Christian, who reigned only three months. The
legions elected, after Jovian’s death, Valentinian, who, though a sincere
Christian, strictly maintained the religious liberty of his subjects; and
the same policy was followed by his brother and colleague Valens, who
governed the eastern part of the empire, and was an Arian. Valentinian’s
son and successor, Gratian, though educated by the celebrated poet
Ausonius, who adhered to the ancient worship, was a zealous Christian. He
published, immediately after his accession, an edict allowing perfect
religious liberty to all his subjects, with the exception of the
Manicheans and some other sects. He granted several new privileges to
Christians, but he continued to conform for some time to the duties
inherited from his Pagan predecessors, of which the most remarkable
instance was, that he caused his father to be placed amongst the gods,
according to the general custom followed at the death of the Roman
emperors.(35)
Though greatly enfeebled by the continual advance of Christianity,
Paganism was still the established religion of the state. Its rites were
still observed with their wonted solemnity, and its power was still so
great at Rome, that a vestal virgin was executed in that city for the
breach of her vow of chastity, subsequently to the reign of Gratian. These
circumstances induced, probably, the above-mentioned emperor to respect
the religious institutions of Rome during the first years of his reign,
but (382), acting under the advice of St Ambrose, he confiscated the
property belonging to the Pagan temples, and the incomes of which served
for the maintenance of priests and the celebration of sacrifices. He
abolished, at the same time, all the privileges and immunities of the
Pagan priests, and ordered the altar and statue of the goddess of Victory
to be removed from the hall of the senate, the presence of which gave to
that assembly, though it already contained many Christian members, the
character of a Pagan institution.
The senate sent a deputation to Gallia, where Gratian was at that time, in
order to remonstrate against these measures, and to present to him, at the
same time, the insignia of the supreme pontificate of Rome, which none of
his Christian predecessors had yet refused. But Gratian rejected these
emblems of Paganism, saying that it was not meet for a Christian to accept
them. This would have been probably followed by other more decided
measures, had he not perished a short time afterwards in a rebellion.
Theodosius the Great, whom Gratian had associated with him, adopted a
decidedly hostile policy towards Paganism, and proclaimed a series of laws
against it. Thus, in 381, he ordered that those Christians who returned to
Paganism should forfeit the right of making wills; but as these apostasies
continued, he ordered, in 383, that the apostates should not inherit any
kind of property, either left by will or descended by natural order of
succession, unless it were left by their parents or a brother. In 385 he
proclaimed the penalty of death against all those who should inquire into
futurity by consulting the entrails of the victims, or try to obtain the
same object by _execrable_ and _magic_ consultations, which evidently
referred to those secret divinations that had been prohibited by
Constantine, as well as his Pagan predecessors. In the course of the year
391, he published a series of edicts, prohibiting under pain of death
every immolation, and all other acts of idolatry under that of
confiscation of the houses or lands where they had been performed.
Theodosius died in 395, but had his life been prolonged, he would probably
have developed still farther his policy against Paganism, which was
greatly weakened in the course of his reign. Many Pagan temples,
particularly in the Eastern provinces, were destroyed during his reign by
the Christians, acting without the orders of the emperor, but not punished
by him for these acts of violence. He did not, however, constrain the
Pagans to embrace Christianity; and, notwithstanding that he proclaimed
several laws against their worship, he employed many of them even in the
highest offices of the state.(36) Notwithstanding the severe laws
published by Theodosius against idolatry, Rome still contained a great
number of pagan temples, and the polytheist party continued to be strong
in the senate, as well as in the army, which is evident from the two
following facts. When Alaric elected in 409 Attalus emperor of Rome, the
new monarch distributed the first dignities of the state to Pagans, and
restored the public solemnities of the ancient worship, in order to
maintain himself on the throne by the support of the Pagan party; which
proves that, though a century had already elapsed since the conversion of
Constantine, this party was not yet considered quite insignificant. About
the same time, Honorius having proclaimed a law which excluded from the
offices of the imperial palace all those who did not profess his religion,
was obliged to revoke it, because it gave offence to the Pagan officers of
the army. Arcadius, who succeeded Theodosius on the throne of the Eastern
empire, proclaimed, immediately after his accession in 398, that he would
strictly enforce the laws of his father against Paganism, and he issued in
the following year new and more severe ordinances of the same kind. The
blow which may be said to have overturned Paganism in the Roman empire did
not, however, come from its Christian monarchs, but from the same hand
which destroyed its ancient capital, and inflicted upon the Western empire
a mortal wound which it did not survive many years.
The Goths, whom the energy and wise policy of Theodosius had maintained in
their allegiance to the empire, being offended by Arcadius, revolted, and
invaded his dominions under Alaric, in 396. They ravaged the provinces
situated between the Adriatic and the Black Seas, and penetrated into
Greece, where Paganism, notwithstanding all the enactments of Theodosius,
was still prevailing to a very great extent. The principal cities of
Greece were devastated by the Goths, who, recently converted to Arianism,
and having no taste for arts, destroyed all the temples, statues, and
other pagan monuments, with which they met. Athens escaped the fury of the
invaders, but the celebrated temple of Eleusis, whose mysteries continued
in full vigour in spite of all the laws which had been published against
polytheism, was destroyed, whilst its priests either perished or fled.
This catastrophe was so much felt by the adherents of the ancient worship
in Greece, that many of them are said to have committed suicide from
grief. “Since the defeat of Cheronea, and the capture of Corinth, the
Greek nationality had never experienced a severer blow than the
destruction of its temples and of its gods by Alaric,” says an eminent
German writer of our day.(37) It was, indeed, a mortal blow to a religion
which maintained its sway by acting upon the senses and the imagination,
as well as upon the feelings of national pride or vanity, because it
destroyed all the means by which such feelings were produced. Alaric and
his Goths seem to have been destined by Providence to precipitate the fall
of Paganism at Rome, as well as in Greece, because the capture and sack of
the eternal city by these barbarians, in 410, accelerated the ruin of its
ancient worship more than all the laws proclaimed against it by the
Christian emperors. The particulars of this terrible catastrophe have been
amply described by Gibbon, and I shall only observe, that though
Christians had suffered on that occasion as much as Pagans, the worship of
the latter was struck at the very root of its existence by the complete
ruin of the Roman aristocracy, who, although frequently indifferent about
the tenets of the national polytheism, supported it with all their
influence as a political institution, which could not be abolished without
injuring the most vital interests of their order.(38) The decline of
Paganism from that time was very rapid. It is true that we have sufficient
historical evidence to show that pagan temples were still to be found at
Rome after its sack by the Goths, and that many Pagans were employed, in
the Western as well as in the Eastern empires, in some of the most
important offices of the state; but their number was fast disappearing,
and the exercise of their religion was generally confined to the domestic
hearth, to the worship of the _Lares_ and _Penates_. It seems to have been
particularly prevalent amongst the rustic population of the provinces, and
it was not entirely extinct in Italy even at the beginning of the sixth
century; because the Goth, Theodoric the Great, who reigned over that
country from 493 to 526, published an edict forbidding, under pain of
death, to sacrifice according to the Pagan rites, as well as other
superstitious practices remaining from the ancient polytheism.
I have given this sketch of the state of Paganism after the conversion of
Constantine, and of the policy which was followed towards it by the first
Christian emperors, because it seems to explain, at least to a certain
degree, the manner in which Christianity was rapidly corrupted in the
fourth and fifth centuries by the Pagan ideas and practices which I shall
endeavour to trace in my next chapter.
Chapter IV. Infection Of The Christian Church By Pagan Ideas And Practices
During The Fourth And Fifth Centuries.
I have said that the council of Elvira, in Spain, held in 305, prohibited
the use of images in the churches. Other canons of the same council show
that even then Christians were but too prone to relapse into the practices
and customs of Paganism; because they enact very severe ecclesiastical
penances against those Christians who took part in the rites and festivals
of the Pagan worship.(39)
If such enactments were required to maintain the purity of Christian
doctrine, at a time when its converts, instead of expecting any worldly
advantages, were often exposed to severe persecution, and consequently had
no other motives for embracing it than a mere conviction of its truth, how
much more was this purity endangered when conversion to Christianity led
to the favour of the sovereign, and when the church, instead of severely
repressing the idolatrous propensities of her children, endeavoured to
facilitate as much as possible the entrance of the Pagans into her pale!
Let me add, that the mixture of Christianity with Paganism in various
public acts of the first Christian emperors, which I have described in the
preceding chapter, could not but contribute to the general confusion of
ideas amongst those Christians whom the church was continually receiving
into her pale, with all their pagan notions. I have described, in the
second chapter of this essay, the policy of compromise adopted by the
church after the conversion of Constantine. I shall now describe the
consequences of this policy, by giving a sketch of the Christian society
which it produced, and which has been drawn, on the authority of
ecclesiastical writers, by the same author whose description and defence
of that policy I have given in the above-mentioned chapter.
“Towards the beginning of the fifth century, the propagation of
Christianity amongst the upper classes of Roman society met still with
many obstacles; but the influential persons who had broken with the error,
remained at least faithful to their new creed, and did not scandalise
society by their apostasy. The senatorial families which had embraced
Christianity gave, at Rome, the unfortunately too rare example of piety
and of all the Christian virtues; the case was different with the converts
belonging to the lower, and even the middle classes of Roman society. The
corruption of manners had made rapid progress amongst them during the last
fifty years of the fourth century; and things arrived at such a pass, that
the choice of a religion was considered by the people as an act of the
greatest indifference. The new religion was embraced from interest, from
curiosity, or by fashion, and afterwards abandoned on the first occasion.
It was, in fact, not indifference, because indifference induces people to
remain in the religion in which they were born; it was a complete atheism,
a revolting depravity, an openly-expressed contempt of all that is most
sacred. How many times the church, which struggled, but in vain, against
the progress of the evil, had occasion to lament the too easy recruits
whom she was making amongst the inferior ranks of society!(40) People
disgracefully ignorant, without honour, without a shadow of piety,
polluted by their presence the assemblies of the faithful. They are those
whom the fathers of the church designated by the name of the _mali
Christiani_—_ficti Christiani_, and against whom their eloquent voices
were often resounding. The heretics, the promoters of troubles and
seditions, always counted upon those men, who seemed to enter the church
only in order to disturb her by their turbulent spirit, or who consented
to remain in the true faith only on condition of introducing into the
usages of Christian worship, a crowd of superstitions whose influence was
felt but too long;(41) whilst the slightest sign of Paganism was
sufficient to call back to it those servants of all the parties.
“It was then, unfortunately, a too common thing to see men who made a
profession of passing, without any difficulty, from one religion to
another, as many times as it was required by their interests. The
principle of that inconceivable corruption in the bosom of a religion
which was not yet completely developed, dated from a period anterior to
that which we are describing.(42) The councils and the emperors had
struggled in vain against apostasy, which the multitude of heresies, and
the vices of the times, had placed amongst legitimate actions.
“Theodosius began in 381 to punish the apostates by depriving them of the
right to make wills. In 383, he modified this law in respect to the
apostate catechumens; but the general principle maintained all the
apostates _absque jure Romano_. Valentinian II. followed the example of
his colleague, and applied the before-mentioned dispositions to those
Christians who became Jews or Manicheans. We know, from a law of 391, that
the nobility was infected by the general spirit of the age, because
Valentinian enacted, by this law, that those nobles who became apostates
were to be degraded in such a manner that they should not count even _in
vulgi ignobilis parte_. In 396, Arcadius deprived again of the right to
make wills those Christians _qui se idolorum superstitione impia
maculaverint_.(43) The political authorities, therefore, cannot be accused
of having remained indifferent to the progress of the evil. We must now
show how little power the laws had in a time like that which we are
describing.
“One day, St Augustinus presented to the assembly of the Christians of
Hippona, a man who was to become celebrated amongst renegades; born a
Pagan, he embraced Christianity, but returned again to the idols, and
exercised the lucrative profession of an astrologer; he now demanded to be
readmitted into the church, that is to say, to change for the third time
his religion. St Augustinus addressed, on that occasion, the
above-mentioned assembly in the following manner:—
“ ‘This former Christian, terrified by the power of God, is now repenting.
In the days of his faithfulness, he was enticed by the enemy, and became
an astrologer; seduced and deceived himself, he was seducing and deceiving
others; he uttered many lies against God, who gave men the power to do
good, and to do no evil; he said that it was not the will of men which
made men adulterers, but Venus; that it was Mars who rendered people
murderers; that justice was not inspired by God, but by Jupiter; and he
added to it many other sacrileges. How much money he has swindled from
self-styled Christians! How many people have purchased the lie from him!
But now, if we are to believe him, he hates the error, he laments the loss
of many souls; and feeling himself caught by the demon, he returns toward
God full of repentance. Let us believe, brethren, that it is fear which
produces this change. What shall we say? perhaps we must not rejoice so
much at the conversion of this pagan astrologer, because once being
converted, he may seek to obtain the clerical office; he is penitent,
brethren, and asks only for mercy. I recommend him to your hearts, and to
your eyes. Let your hearts love him, but let your eyes watch him. Mark him
well; and wherever you shall meet him, show him to those of your brethren
who are not present here. This will be an act of mercy, because we must
fear that his seductive soul should change again, and recommence to do
mischief. Watch him; know what he says, and where he goes, in order that
your testimony may confirm us in the opinion that he is really converted.
He was perishing, but now he is found again. He has brought with him the
books which have burnt him, in order to throw them into the fire; he
wishes to be refreshed by the flames which shall consume them. You must
know, brethren, that he had knocked at the door of the church before
Easter, but that the profession which he had followed, rendering him
suspected of lies and fraud, he was kept back, but shortly afterwards
received. We are afraid of leaving him exposed to new temptations. Pray to
Christ for him.’
“Socrates(44) speaks of a sophist of Constantinople, called Ecebolus, who
conformed with a marvellous facility to all the changes of fortune which
Christianity was undergoing. During the reign of Constantine, he affected
the greatest zeal for the new belief; but when Julian became emperor, he
resumed his ancient devotion to the gods of Paganism. After the death of
that monarch, he gave great publicity to his repentance, and prostrated
himself before the churches, crying to the Christians, ‘Tread me under
your feet, as the salt which has lost its savour!’ Socrates
adds:—‘Ecebolus remained what he has always been,—_i.e._, a fickle and
inconstant man.’ St Augustinus could certainly say the same of his
astrologer. Is it not surprising to find apostasy still prevalent at a
time when no sensible man could believe in the restoration of the ancient
worship? The appearance of Julian must have upset many a mind, shaken many
a conscience, and given to the triumph of Christianity the character of a
transitory event. But, at the end of the fourth century, it was impossible
to abandon the church and return to the idols, except by a feeling which
could not but excite profound pity. I therefore understand why St
Augustinus had consented to plead with the Christians in favour of a
wretch already charged with three apostasies: he wished, above all, to
take from him the name of a Pagan, being convinced that whoever consented
no longer to sacrifice to the false gods would finally belong to the true
religion. A neophyte, restrained by the leaven of all the pagan passions,
might remain more or less time on the threshold of the church, but sooner
or later he was sure to cross it.(45) The leaders of the church considered
it always a favourable presumption when a citizen consented to call
himself no longer a Pagan. This first victory appeared to them a sure
presage of a true conversion; and they recommended to the Christians that
they should not apply the dangerous epithet of _Pagan_ to those of their
brethren who had failed, but simply to call them _sinners_. They
endeavoured, in short, to make them forget Paganism; and in order to
attain this object, they even forbade to pronounce its name.(46)
“The ancient worship was not only obstructing the development of
Christianity by covert and insidious attacks, but it was also vitiating
the discipline of the church, because its sway upon the manners of the
converts was something more like a real tyranny than the natural remnant
of its former influence. It is, indeed, surprising with what facility it
introduced into the sanctuary of the true God its superstitious spirit,
its relaxed morals, and its love of disorder. How little the church was
then,—_i.e._, seventy years after the conversion of
Constantine,—resembling what she ought to have been, or what she became
afterwards!(47) St Jerome had intended, towards the end of his life, to
write an ecclesiastical history; but it was in order to show that the
church, under the Christian emperors, went on continually declining.
_Divitiis major, virtutibus minor_ (Greater in wealth, smaller in virtue),
was the severe sentence which St Jerome must have pronounced with regret,
but the justice of which is proved by all the historical documents of that
period. This illustrious leader of Christianity, whose mind was more
inclined to enthusiasm than dejection, frequently lost all energy, by
reflecting on the deplorable condition of the church, declaring that he
felt no longer any power to write. A sufficient number of historians have
represented in vivid colours the excessive luxury of the bishops during
that time, as well as the greediness, the ignorance, and the misconduct of
the clergy; I shall therefore choose from this melancholy picture only
those parts which refer to the history of Paganism.
“All the arts of divination remained still in the highest favour amongst
Christians, even when the grave men of the Pagan party had been, for a
long time, showing for these practices of idolatry either a conventional
respect or an open contempt.(48) They swore by the false gods,—they
observed the fifth day, dedicated to Jupiter,—and they took a part in the
sacred games, feasts, and festivals of the Pagans. Christian ceremonies
did not preserve almost any thing of their ancient majesty. It was not a
rare occurrence to hear pagan hymns chanted at Christian solemnities, or
to see Christians dancing before their churches, according to the custom
of Paganism. There was no more decency observed in the interior of those
churches: people went there to speak about business, or to amuse
themselves; the noise was so great, and the bursts of laughter so loud,
that it was impossible to hear the reading of the Scriptures; the
congregation quarrelled, fought, and sometimes interfered with the
officiating priest, pressing him to end, or compelling him to sing,
according to their taste. St Augustinus was therefore warranted in calling
this so powerful influence of the ancient worship a persecution of the
demon, more covert and insidious than that which the primitive church had
suffered.
“All these scandalous facts are attested by the bishop of Hippona (St
Augustinus) and by that of Milan (St Ambrose); it is therefore impossible
to doubt their authenticity. It may, however, be said, that such a state
of corruption was local, and peculiar to the churches of Africa and Milan;
I must therefore produce new evidence, in order to show that the
calamitous effect of the pagan manners was felt in all the provinces.
“St Gaudentius, bishop of Brescia, a contemporary of St Augustinus,
vigorously combated idolatry in his diocese; and the following is an
extract from one of his sermons:—
“ ‘You neophytes, who have been called to the feast of this salutary and
mystical Easter, look how you preserve your souls from those aliments
which have been defiled by the superstition of the Pagans. It is not
enough for a true Christian to reject the poisoned food of the demons; he
must also fly from all the abominations of the Pagans,—from all the frauds
of the idolaters, as from venom ejected by the serpent of the devil.
Idolatry is composed of poisonings, of enchantments, ligatures, presages,
augurs, sorceries, as well as of all kinds of vain observances, and,
moreover, of the festival called _Parentales_; by means of which idolatry
is reanimating error; and indeed men, giving way to their gluttony, began
to eat the viands which had been prepared for the dead; afterwards they
were not afraid of celebrating in their honour sacrilegious
sacrifices,—although it is difficult to believe that a duty towards their
dead is discharged by those who, with a hand shaking from the effects of
drunkenness, place tables on sepulchres, and say, with an unintelligible
voice, _The spirit is thirsty_.(49) I beseech you, take heed of these
things, in case God should deliver to the flames of hell his contemners
and enemies, who have refused to wear his yoke.’
“Who may wonder that such Christians allowed the pagan idols, temples, and
altars to remain, and to be honoured on their estates, as is attested by
the same bishop? St Augustinus, whom I am not tired of quoting, because no
other doctor of that time expressed so vividly the true Christian ideas,
lamented this monstrous worship, which was neither Paganism nor
Christianity. ‘Many a man,’ says he, ‘who enters the church a Christian,
leaves it a Pagan,’ However, far from despairing, he wrote to the virgin
Felicia, ‘I advise thee not to be affected too much by these offences;
they were predicted, in order that, when they should come, we might
remember that they had been announced, and consequently not be hurt by
them.’ But the Pagans, for whom this premature corruption of Christianity
was not a predicted thing, rejoiced in contemplating the extent of its
progress; they would not believe the duration of a worship which had so
rapidly arrived at the period of its decline, and they were repeating in
their delusion this celebrated saying, ‘Christians are only for awhile;
they will afterwards perish, and the idols will return.’ ”—_Beugnot_, vol.
ii. p. 97, _et seq._
This melancholy picture of Christian society, at the beginning of the
fifth century, drawn by M. Beugnot, on the authority of the ecclesiastical
writers, is, indeed, as gloomy as that of Roman society in general, which
had been so graphically described about the same time by the pagan author
Ammianus Marcellinus, and reproduced by Gibbon. It was very natural that
such a corrupted soil should produce the rankest growth of superstition,
and rapidly bring about that melancholy reaction which was not inaptly
styled by Gibbon, “the revival of polytheism in the Christian church.”
This wretched state of things was, as I have said before, chiefly due to
that policy of compromise by which the leaders of the church sought to get
as many Pagans as possible into her pale, and who consequently were
baptised without being converted. This compromise with Paganism was often
carried to great extremes; and the history of the conversion of Florence,
which I have extracted from M. Beugnot’s work, gives one of the most
striking instances of those unprincipled proceedings:—“Florence paid
particular honours to the god Mars. It was not without regret that it
abandoned the worship of this divinity. The time of its conversion had
been assigned to the second or the third century, but the vagueness of
this date deprives it of all authority. Yet, whatever may have been the
century in which the conversion of Florence took place, it could not be a
subject of edification and joy to the Christians. The traditions of that
city predicted to it great calamities if the statue of Mars was either
sullied, or put into a place unworthy of it. The Florentines stipulated,
therefore, on accepting the new religion, that Mars should be respected.
His statue was consequently neither broken nor sullied, but it was
carefully taken from his temple, and placed on a pedestal near the river,
which flows through the city. Many years after this, the new Christians
feared and invoked that god who was dethroned only by halves. When almost
all the pagan temples had fallen either by the stroke of time, or under
the blows of the Christians, the heathen palladium of Florence stood still
erect on the banks of the Arno; and, according to one of the most
enlightened historians that Italy has produced during the middle ages (G.
Villani, lib. i., cap. 60), the demon who had remained in the statue
realised, in the thirteenth century, the old prediction of the
Etruscans.(50) Compromises of the kind which took place at Florence became
very common during the fifth century, and when, at a later period,
Christianity wished to annul them, it met with great obstacles.”—(BEUGNOT,
vol. i., p. 286.)
The Jews had been brought up in the knowledge of the true God, and their
faith could not but be strengthened by the miracles with which their
exodus from Egypt was accompanied, and yet a short absence of Moses from
their camp was sufficient to make them call for gods that would go before
them, and to induce them to worship an image evidently borrowed from the
idolatry of those very Egyptians by whom they had been so much oppressed.
It was, therefore, no wonder that society, educated for many centuries
under the influence of Paganism, were continually returning to their
ancient rites, superstitions, and manners, though under a new name, and in
a modified form. If we consider further, that such a man as Aaron had not
sufficient strength to resist the senseless demands of the multitude, and
even consented to mould an object for their idolatry, how could the
leaders of the church oppose the pressure of Paganism, which they had
incautiously admitted into her pale, and which, under the assumed name of
Christianity, was establishing its dominion over the church? There was no
inspired prophet amongst the Christians of that time, to restore the
purity of their faith in the same manner as Moses did amongst the Jews,
after his return from Mount Sinai. The Christian church was therefore left
for centuries under the oppression of pagan superstitions, from which, as
yet, only a small portion of her has been emancipated, though I firmly
believe that she will be one day entirely restored to her pristine purity.
This hope, however, is not founded upon the mere advance of human
intellect, because, in spite of its boasted progress, it seems now to be
powerless against the daily growing reaction of the above-mentioned
superstitions, even in places whence they apparently had been banished for
ever, but because Christianity is of a divine and not human origin.
There was no lack of opposition to this universal corruption of the church
on the part of several true Christians, and there were undoubtedly many
more instances of this noble conduct than those which have reached us, but
the records of them were probably either lost in the lapse of ages, or
destroyed by their opponents. I have already mentioned the prohibition of
the use of images in the churches by the council of Elvira in 305. The
council of Laodicea, held about 363, declared, in its seventy-fifth canon,
“_That Christians ought not to abandon the church, and retire elsewhere in
order to invoke angels, and form private assemblies, because it is
prohibited. If, therefore, any one is attached to this secret idolatry,
let him be anathema, because he has left our Lord Jesus Christ, and has
become an idolater._” It is therefore evident that this superstition,
expressly prohibited by St Paul, Col. ii. 18, was then secretly practised
in some private assemblies, though it was afterwards introduced into the
Western as well as the Eastern church. The council of Carthage, held
towards the end of the fourth century, condemned the abuse of the honours
which were paid to the memory of the martyrs by the Christians of Africa,
and ordered the bishops to repress them, _if the thing might be done, but
if it could not be done on account of the popular emotions_, to warn at
least the people. This proves how weak the bishops felt their authority to
be against the prevailing superstitions amongst their flocks, and that
they preferred suffering the latter to risking the former.
There were, however, Christians who opposed, in a bold and uncompromising
manner, the pagan errors and abuses which had infected the church. St
Epiphanius, archbishop of Salamis, in the fourth century, celebrated for
his learning, and whose virtues St Jerome extols in the most glowing
terms, explicitly condemned the worship of created beings, “because,” he
observed, “the devil was creeping into men’s minds under the pretence of
devotion and justice, and, consecrating human nature by divine honours,
presented to their eyes various fine images, in order to separate the mind
from the one God by an infamous adultery. Therefore, though those who are
worshipped are dead, people adore their images, which never had any life
in them.” He further remarked, “that there was not a prophet who would
have suffered a man or a woman to be worshipped; that neither the prophet
Elias, nor St John the beloved disciple of the Lord, nor St Thecla (who
had received the most extravagant praises from the fathers), were ever
worshipped; and that, consequently, the virgin was neither to be invoked
nor worshipped.” “_The old superstition_,” says he, “_shall not have such
power over us as to oblige us to abandon the living God, and worship his
creature._”(51)
The same St Epiphanius relates, in a letter addressed to John, bishop of
Jerusalem, that having arrived during a journey at a village called
Anablatta, he found in its church a veil suspended over the door, with a
figure representing _Christ or some saint_. He was so indignant at this
sight that he immediately tore the veil to pieces, and advised the wardens
of that church to employ it as a shroud to bury a dead body. As the people
of the place complained that the veil of their church was destroyed,
without giving them in its place another, Epiphanius sent them one; but he
exhorted in his letter the above-mentioned bishop of Jerusalem, in whose
diocese Anablatta was situated, to order the priests of that place not to
suspend any more such veils in the church of Christ, _because they are
contrary to our religion_.
The authenticity of this letter, which bears such strong evidence against
the use of images in churches, was rejected by Bellarmine and the
ecclesiastical historian Baronius, but it has been admitted by Petau and
some of the ablest writers of the Roman Catholic Church. It was translated
into Latin by St Jerome, and is found in all the collections of his works.
The most celebrated opponent of the abuses with which the church had been
already infected at that time was Vigilantius. His writings have not been
preserved, and we know his opinions only from their refutation by St
Jerome, and from which we may conclude that this reformer of the fifth
century maintained the same doctrines which were afterwards defended by
the Waldensians, Wycliffe, the Hussites, and which are now professed by
the Protestant Christians. He was born at Calagorris in Gallia; he became
a priest at Barcelona, and contracted in that place an intimate friendship
with St Paulinus, afterwards bishop of Nola. Vigilantius went to Italy in
order to see this friend of his, and having an intention to visit
Palestine and Egypt, took from him an introduction to St Jerome. They
became great friends with St Jerome, who was much pleased with the marks
of approbation shown by Vigilantius during a sermon which he preached. He
also acknowledges that he, as well as several others, would have died from
starvation, if Vigilantius had not assisted them with his own and his
friends’ money; and he says, in his answer to Paulinus, “You will learn
from the mouth of _the holy priest, Vigilantius_, with what affection I
have received him.” This affection disappeared, however, as soon as Jerome
learned that Vigilantius had accused him in Egypt of being too partial to
Origenes, and the _holy priest_ became an _impertinent_, whose silly
speeches he had observed during their first interview. He made use of
several injurious expressions in speaking of the former object of his
admiration, and which do not well accord with the gravity of his
character, as, for instance, calling him often _Dormitantius_ instead of
_Vigilantius_. His indignation knew no bounds when he heard, in 404, that
Vigilantius, who was then in Gallia, had attacked several practices which
had crept into the church, and he dictated in one single night a vehement
answer to the opinions of Vigilantius, who, according to this writer,
taught as follows:—
That the honours paid to the rotten bones and dust of the saints and
martyrs, by adoring, kissing, wrapping them in silver, and enclosing them
in vessels of gold, placing them in churches, and lighting wax candles
before them, was idolatry.
That the celibacy of the clergy was heresy, and their vows of chastity a
seminary of lewdness.
That to pray for the dead, or desire their prayers, was superstition, and
that we can pray one for another only as long as we are alive.
That the souls of the departed apostles and martyrs were at rest in some
particular place, and could not leave it, in order to be present in
various places, for hearing the prayers addressed to them.
That the sepulchres of the martyrs should not be venerated; that vigils
held in churches should be abolished, with the exception of that at
Easter; that to enter monastic life was to become useless to society, &c.
&c.
The answer of Jerome to the above-mentioned opinions of Vigilantius is a
curious mixture of violence and casuistry. He declared his _quondam_
friend and _holy priest_, Vigilantius, a greater monster than all those
which nature had ever produced, the Centaurs, the Behemoths, the Syrens,
the triple-bodied Gerion of Spain; that he was a most detestable heretic,
venting foul blasphemies against the relics of the martyrs, who were
working miracles everyday. “Go,” says he to Vigilantius, “into the
churches of those martyrs, and thou shalt be cleansed from the evil spirit
by which thou art now possessed, and feel thyself burning, not by those
wax candles which offend thee, but by invisible flames, which will force
that demon who talks within thee to confess that he is the same as that
who had personated, perhaps a Mercury, a Bacchus, or some other of the
heathen gods, amongst their followers,” &c. He is unable, however, to
produce any other argument in support of the worship of relics than the
example of those who had practised it. “Was it wrong,” he exclaims, “of
the bishops of Rome to celebrate divine service on the graves containing
the bones of St Peter and St Paul, which, according to Vigilantius, were
nothing better than dust? The Emperor Constantius must then have committed
a sacrilege by translating the holy relics of Andrew, Luke, and Timothy,
to Constantinople; the Emperor Arcadius must be then also considered
sacrilegious, as he has translated the bones of the blessed Samuel from
Judea to Thrace; then all those bishops who consented to preserve mere
dust in vessels of gold or wrapt in silk, were not only sacrilegious, but
were fools; and, finally, that all these people must have been fools who
went out to meet these relics, and received them with as much joy as if
they were the prophet himself alive, because the procession which carried
them was attended by crowds of people from Palestine to Chalcedon, singing
the praises of Christ, whose servant Samuel was.”
There is no abuse in the world which cannot be justified, if the example
of persons occupying a high station or that of great numbers is sufficient
for it. The advocates of the adoration of relics in our own days may
defend it by the fact that about half a million of people went in 1845 to
worship the holy coat of Treves, and that still more recently great
honours were paid to the relics of St Theodosia at Amiens, by a number of
distinguished persons,—bishops, archbishops, and even cardinals. The
_autos da fé_ of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions could not be
wrong, since kings, queens, and the most eminent persons of the state,
approved them by their presence. Idolatry cannot be an error, since so
many monarchs, statesmen, and learned men, had conformed to its rites;
whilst, on the other side, the same reason may be pleaded for the penal
laws of Ireland, and other enactments against the Roman Catholics, because
they were established and maintained by so many parliaments. Jerome
maintained that it was a calumny of Vigilantius to say that the Christians
burnt candles in daylight, though he admitted that it was done by some men
and women in order to honour the martyrs. He did not approve of it,
because their zeal was without knowledge; but he thought that on account
of their good intention, they would be rewarded according to their faith,
like the woman who had anointed the feet of our Lord. He also tried to
justify the use of candles by those passages of the Scriptures where an
allusion was made to _lamps and lights_; as, for instance, the parable of
the virgins, the expression of the Psalm cxix. 105, “Thy word is a lamp
unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”
The rest of the arguments which St Jerome employs in refuting what he
calls the errors and heresies of Vigilantius are of a similar nature to
those which have been given above; and it is really astonishing to see
that a man like this celebrated father, who is generally considered as one
of the great luminaries of the church, not only by Roman Catholics, but
also by some Protestants, could descend to such miserable shifts, and
indulge in such violent language as he did, in his answer to Vigilantius,
which bears a strong mark of having been dictated more by his personal
feelings against his former friend and benefactor, than by a conviction of
the justice of the cause which he was defending on that occasion. It is,
however, evident from the other writings of the same father of the church,
that his imagination was much more powerful than his reasoning faculties,
and that he had entirely forgotten the precept of St Paul, to “_refuse
profane and old wives’ fables_”—(1 Timothy iv. 7)—because no one has ever
indulged in more absurd fables than this good father did, in his lives of
St Hilarion and St Paul, two celebrated monks, and of which the following
is a fair specimen:—
“A Christian citizen of Majuma, called Italicus, kept horses for racing,
but was continually beaten by his rival, a pagan ducumvir of Gaza, who, by
using certain charms and diabolical incantations, contrived always to damp
the spirits of the Christian’s horses, and to give vigour to his own.
Italicus applied, therefore, for help to St Hilarion, who, thinking that
it was improper to make prayers for such a frivolous object, advised
Italicus to sell his horses, and to give their price to the poor, for the
salvation of his soul. Italicus represented, however, that he was
discharging against his inclination the duties of a public office, and
that as a Christian could not resort to magical means, he addressed
himself to a servant of God, particularly as it was important to defeat
the inhabitants of Gaza, who were known as enemies of Christ, and that it
was not so much for his own interests as for those of the church that he
wished to overcome his rival. Hilarion, convinced by these reasons, filled
with water an earthen vessel, from which he usually drank, and delivered
it to Italicus, who sprinkled with the water his horses, his chariots and
charioteers, his stables, and even the barriers of the racing ground. The
whole city was in a great excitement, the idolaters deriding the
Christians, who loudly expressed their confidence of victory. The signal
being given, the Christian’s horses flew with an extreme rapidity, and
left those of his rival far behind. This miracle produced a very great
effect upon the spectators, and many persons, including the beaten party,
became converts to Christianity.”
The above-mentioned work is filled with fables still more extravagant than
the one which I have related, and which entirely throw into the shade the
celebrated tales of Munchausen. Jerome complained that many people, whom,
in his Christian meekness, he calls _Scyllean dogs_, were laughing at the
stories related in those works, and which he begins by invoking the
assistance of the Holy Ghost. Was it then a wonder that a Christianity,
defended by such wretched superstitions, was frequently abandoned by
individuals, who, comparing the Christian legends of the kind quoted above
with the fictions of Pagan mythology, preferred the latter as being more
poetical? and, indeed, we have instances of the ridicule which the Pagans
attempted to throw upon Christianity, by comparing its saints with their
own gods and demigods.
I must, however, return once more to Vigilantius.(52) The Roman Catholic
historian of the church, Baronius, who calls him “_a horned beast, a fool,
and furious, who had reached the last degree of folly and fury_,” &c.,
&c., maintains that his heresy was solemnly condemned by the Pope Innocent
I., whom the bishops of Gallia had addressed on this subject. He also says
that the same heresy produced terrible consequences; because two years
after Vigilantius had spread his doctrines, the Vandals and other
barbarians invaded Gallia, and destroyed all his adherents. Admitting even
with Baronius that Vigilantius was a damnable heretic, it cannot be denied
that this learned historian had a very strange notion of divine justice,
because the barbarians alluded to above destroyed a great number of
churches and relics, as well as those who prayed at their shrines, whilst
Vigilantius died quietly, and, notwithstanding the assertion of Baronius,
never was excluded from the communion of the church, or even condemned by
her legal authorities.
We know from Vigilantius’ opponents that his opinions were approved by
many, and there can be no doubt that there was, not only in his days, but
long after him, a good number of witnesses for the truth, who opposed the
rapid spread of Pagan ideas and practices in the church. Thus, at the end
of the sixth century, Serenus, bishop of Marseilles, removed all the
images from his church, because the people worshipped them. This produced
a great discontent amongst many people of his diocese, who appealed to
Pope Gregory I. in favour of the images. The Pope advised a middle course,
_i.e._, that the images should remain in the church, but that it should
not be allowed to worship them. Serenus, however, who well knew that the
one infallibly led to the other, refused to comply with the papal
injunctions, upon which Gregory wrote to him again, saying that he praised
his zeal in not suffering the worship of any thing that was made by the
hand of man; but that images should not be destroyed, because pictures
were used in churches to teach the ignorant by sight what they could not
read in books, &c.(53)
We therefore see that at the end of the sixth century, the celebrated Pope
Gregory I., surnamed the Great, considered the worship of images as an
abuse to be prohibited, but which was afterwards legalised by his
successors, and an opposition to it declared heresy.
I could produce other evidences to show that the worship of images was
condemned by many bishops and priests of the period which I have
described, though they approved their use as a means of teaching the
illiterate, or tolerated them as an unavoidable evil. The limits of this
essay allow me not, however, to extend my researches on this subject, and
I shall endeavour to give in the next chapter a rapid sketch of the
violent reaction against the worship of images in the east by the
iconoclast emperors, and of the more moderate, but no less decided,
opposition to the same practice in the west by Charlemagne.
Chapter V. Reaction Against The Worship Of Images And Other Superstitious
Practices By The Iconoclast Emperors Of The East.
The worship of images, as well as other Pagan practices, introduced into
the church during the fourth and fifth centuries, were prevailing in the
east as much as in the west; and I have mentioned, p. 9, that the monks,
particularly those of Egypt, had greatly contributed to the introduction
of anthropomorphism into the Christian church. A great blow to
image-worship was given in the east by the rise and rapid progress of
Mahometanism, whose followers, considering it as idolatry, destroyed many
objects to which certain miraculous virtues had been ascribed, and they
constantly taunted the Christians with their belief in such superstitions.
The Jews addressed the same reproaches to the Christians; “yet,” as Gibbon
has justly observed, “their servitude might curb their zeal and depreciate
their authority; but the triumphant Mussulman, who reigned at Damascus,
and threatened Constantinople, cast into the scale of reproach the
accumulated weight of truth and victory.”(54) And, indeed, there could not
be a stronger argument against the efficacy of images than the rapid
conquest by the Mahometans of many Christian cities which relied upon a
miraculous defence by some images preserved in their churches. This
circumstance could not but produce, in the minds of many thinking
Christians, a conviction of the absurdity of image-worship, and the spread
of such opinions must have been promoted by congregations who had
preserved the purity of primitive worship, and of whom it appears that
there were several still extant in the eighth century, as well as by the
influence of Armenia, a country with which the eastern empire had frequent
intercourse of a political and commercial nature, and whose church
rejected at that time the worship of images. This party wanted only a
leader and favourable circumstances in order publicly to assert their
condemnation of the prevailing practice, which they considered as sinful
idolatry. The accession of Leo III., the Isaurian, in 717, who, from an
inferior condition, rose by his talents and military prowess to the
imperial throne, gave to that party what they required, for he shared
their opinions, and was a man of great energy and ability. The troubles of
the state, which the valour and political wisdom of Leo saved from
impending ruin, occupied too much the first years of that emperor’s reign
to allow him to undertake a reform of the church. But in 727 he assembled
a council of senators and bishops, and decided, with their consent, that
all the images should be removed in the churches from the sanctuary and
the altar, to a height where they might be seen, but not worshipped, by
the congregation.(55) It was, however, impossible to follow long this
middle course, as the adherents of the images contrived to worship them in
spite of their elevation, while their opponents taxed the emperor with
want of zeal, holding out to him the example of the Jewish monarch, who
had caused the brazen serpent to be broken. Leo therefore ordered all
kinds of images to be destroyed; and though his edict met with some
opposition,(56) it was put into execution throughout the whole empire,
with the exception of the Italian provinces, which, instigated by Pope
Gregory II., a zealous defender of images, revolted against the emperor,
and resisted all his efforts to regain his dominion over them. This
monarch died in 741, after a not inglorious reign of twenty-four years,
and was succeeded on the throne by his son Constantine VIII., surnamed
Copronymus. All the information which we possess about this monarch, as
well as the other iconoclast emperors, is derived from historians
violently opposed to their religious views. These writers represent
Constantine VIII. as one of the greatest monsters that ever disgraced
humanity, stained by every imaginable vice; and having exhausted all the
usual terms of opprobrium, they invent some such ridiculous expressions as
a “_leopard generated by a lion, an aspic born from the seeds of a
serpent, a flying dragon_,” &c.; but they do not adduce in confirmation of
these epithets any of those criminal acts which have disgraced the reigns
of many Byzantine emperors, whose piety is extolled by the same writers.
We know, moreover, by the evidence of those very historians who have
bespattered with all those opprobrious terms the memory of Constantine,
that he was a brave and skilful leader, who defeated the Arabs, the most
formidable enemies of the empire, and restored several of its lost
provinces, and that the country was prosperous under his reign of
thirty-four years—741 to 775.
The beginning of Constantine’s reign was disturbed by his own
brother-in-law, Artabasdes, who, supported by the adherents of the images,
competed for the imperial throne, but was defeated, and his party crushed.
Constantine, desiring to abolish the abuse, which he regarded as idolatry,
by a solemn decision of the church declared, in 753, his intention to
convoke for this object a general council; and in order that the question
at issue should be thoroughly sifted, he enjoined all the bishops of the
empire to assemble local synods, and to examine the subject, previously to
its being debated by the general council. This council, composed of three
hundred and thirty-eight bishops, met at Constantinople in 754, and, after
having deliberated for six months, decided that, _conformably to Holy Writ
and the testimony of the fathers, all images were to be removed from the
churches, and whoever would dare to make an image, in order to place it in
a church, to worship it, or to keep it concealed in his house, was, if a
clerk, to be deposed, if a layman, to be anathematised_. The council
added, that those who adhered to the images were to be punished by the
imperial authorities as _enemies of the doctrine of the fathers, and
breakers of the law of God_. This decision was pronounced by the assembled
bishops unanimously, and without a single dissentient voice, which had
never been the case before. This assembly took the title of the Seventh
Ecumenical Council, and the emperor ordered its decision to be put into
execution throughout all his dominions. The images were removed from the
churches, and those which were painted on the walls covered with
whitewash. The principal opposition to the imperial order was offered by
the monks, who were always the chief promoters of image-worship; and
Constantine is accused of having repressed this opposition with a violence
common to that barbarous age. He is said to have entertained the greatest
hatred against these monks, calling them idolaters, and their dresses the
_dress of darkness_—an opinion with which many persons will be found to
chime, I think, even in our own time. Constantine died in 775, and was
followed on the throne by his son, Leo IV., who inherited the religious
views of his father; whilst his wife, Irene, a beautiful and talented, but
ambitious and unprincipled woman, was a secret worshipper of images. Leo,
who was of a weak constitution, died after a reign of five years,
appointing Irene the guardian of his minor son Constantine, who was then
ten years old. Irene governed the empire with great ability, but was too
fond of power to surrender it to her son at his coming of age, and he
tried to obtain by force what was due to him by right. The party of Irene
proved, however, the stronger; and young Constantine was taken prisoner,
and his mother caused him to be deprived of sight. Irene’s orders were
executed in such an atrocious manner, that the unfortunate prince died in
consequence.(57) Irene governed the empire with great splendour, but her
first object was to restore the worship of images; and the machinations by
which she accomplished this object have been so well related by Gibbon,
that I cannot do better than copy his account of them:—
“Under the reign of Constantine VIII., the union of the civil and
ecclesiastical power had overthrown the tree, without extirpating the root
of superstition. The idols, for such they were now held, were secretly
cherished by the order and the sex most prone to devotion; and the fond
alliance of the monks and females obtained a final victory over the reason
and authority of man. Leo IV. maintained with less rigour the religion of
his father and grandfather, but his wife, the fair and ambitious Irene,
had imbibed the zeal of the Athenians,(58) the heirs of the idolatry
rather than philosophy of their ancestors. During the life of her husband,
these sentiments were inflamed by danger and dissimulation, and she could
only labour to protect and promote some favourite monks, whom she drew
from their caverns, and seated on the metropolitan thrones of the east.
But as soon as she reigned in her own name, and in that of her son, Irene
more seriously undertook the ruin of the iconoclasts, and the first step
of her future persecution was a general edict for liberty of conscience.
In the restoration of the monks, a thousand images were exposed to the
public veneration; a thousand legends were invented of their sufferings
and miracles. By the opportunities of death and removal, the episcopal
seats were judiciously filled; the most eager competitors for celestial or
earthly favour anticipated and flattered the judgment of their sovereign;
and the promotion of her secretary Tarasius gave Irene the patriarch of
Constantinople, and the command of the Oriental church. But the decrees of
a general council could only be repealed by a similar assembly; the
iconoclasts, whom she convened, were bold in possession, and averse to
debate; and the feeble voice of the bishops was re-echoed by the more
formidable clamour of the soldiers and the people of Constantinople. The
delay and intrigues of a year, the separation of the disaffected troops,
and the choice of Nice for a second orthodox synod, removed these
obstacles; and the episcopal conscience was again, after the Greek
fashion, in the hands of the prince.”—_Gibbon’s Roman Empire_, chap. xlix.
This council, held in 786, restored the worship of images by the unanimous
sentence of three hundred and fifty bishops. The acts of this synod have
been preserved, and they are stated by Gibbon to be “a curious monument of
superstition and ignorance, of falsehood and folly.” I am afraid that
there is but too much truth in this severe judgment of Gibbon; and the
following passage relating to the same council, which I have extracted,
not from Gibbon, or any writer of the school to which he belonged, but
from the celebrated Roman Catholic historian of the church, Abbé Fleury,
will enable the reader to form his own judgment on this subject.
After describing the confession of faith signed by that council, which
declared that the images of the saints are to be worshipped, because they
remind us of those whom they represent, and make us participators in their
merits, he says:—
“The last passages showed that God was making miracles by means of images;
and in order to confirm it, a discourse, ascribed to St Athanasius, was
read. It contained the account of a pretended miracle, which happened at
Beryt, with an image of Christ, which, having been pierced by the Jews,
emitted blood, which healed many sick persons. The fathers of the council
were so much moved by this account that they shed tears. It is, however,
certain, that this discourse is not by St Athanasius, and it is even very
doubtful whether the story which it contains is true. Thus it appears that
amongst all the bishops present at this council, there was not a single
one versed in the science of criticism, because many other false documents
were produced in that assembly. This proves nothing against the decision
of the council, because it is sufficiently supported by true documents. It
only proves the ignorance of the times, as well as the necessity of
knowing history, chronology, the difference of manners and styles, in
order to discern real documents from spurious ones.”(59)
Thus, according to the authority of one of the most eminent writers of the
Roman Catholic Church, the second Council of Nice, the first synod which
has given an explicit and solemn sanction to one of the most important
tenets of the Western and the Eastern churches, was composed of such
ignorant and silly prelates, that an absurd fable, contained in a forged
paper, could sway their minds and hearts in such a manner as to make them
shed tears of emotion, and that there was not a single individual amongst
these venerable fathers sufficiently informed to be able to discover a
fabrication so gross that it did not escape the attention of scholars who
lived many centuries afterwards.
Irene rigorously enforced the decrees of this council against the
opponents of images; and that woman, guilty of the death of her own son,
and suspected of that of her husband, is extolled by ecclesiastical
writers as a most pious princess. A contemporary Greek writer, and a
zealous defender of image-worship, the monk Theodore Studites, places her
above Moses, and says that “she had delivered the people from the Egyptian
bondage of impiety;” and the historian of the Roman Catholic Church,
Baronius, justifies her conduct by the following argument: that the hands
of the fathers were raised by a just command of God against their
children, who followed strange gods, and that Moses had ordered them to
consecrate themselves to the Lord, even every man upon his son, and upon
his brother, Exod. xxxii. 29, so that it was a high degree of piety to be
cruel to one’s own son; consequently Irene deserved on this account the
first crown of paradise; and that if she had committed the murder of her
son from motives of ambition, she would be worse than Agrippina, mother of
Nero; but if she did it through zeal for religion, as it appears by the
encomium which she had received from very holy men who lived at that time,
she deserves to be praised for her piety.
Irene’s piety, shown by the restoration of images, and the persecution of
their opponents, was indeed so much appreciated by the church, that she
received a place amongst the saints of the Greek calendar. She was,
however, less fortunate in her worldly affairs; because she was deposed in
802 by Nicephorus, who occupied the imperial throne, and exiled to Lesbos,
where she died in great poverty. He did not abolish the images, nor allow
the persecution of their opponents; and the ecclesiastical writers
represent him, on account of this liberal policy, as a perfect monster.
Nicephorus perished in a battle against the Bulgarians in 811, and his
successor Michael, who persecuted the iconoclasts, unable to maintain
himself on the throne, retired into a convent, after a reign of about two
years, and the imperial crown was assumed by Leo V., a native of Armenia,
and one of the most eminent leaders of the army, which elevated him to
this dignity.
Though all that we know about Leo V. is derived from authors zealously
opposed to his religious views, yet, notwithstanding all their _odium
theologicum_, they are obliged to admit that he was gallant in the field,
and just and careful in the administration of civil affairs. Being the
native of a country whose church still resisted the introduction of
images, he was naturally adverse to their worship, and the manner in which
he abolished it in his empire deserves a particular notice; because,
though related by his enemies, it proves that he was a sincere scriptural
Christian.
According to their relation, Leo believed that the victories obtained by
the barbarians, and other calamities to which the empire was exposed, were
a visitation of God in punishment of the worship of images; that he
demanded that a precept for adoring the images should be shown to him in
the gospels, and as the thing was impossible, he rejected them as idols
condemned by the Word of God. They also say, that the attention of Leo
being once drawn to this passage of the prophet Isaiah, “_To whom then
will you liken God? or what likeness will you compare unto him? The
workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with
gold and casteth silver chains_,” (xl. 18, 19,) this circumstance
irritated him more than any thing else against the images. He communicated
his sentiments to the patriarch, and requested him either to remove the
images, or to show a reason why they were worshipped, _since __ the
Scriptures did not order it_. The patriarch, who was an adherent of the
images, tried to elude this demand by various sophisms, which, not having
satisfied the emperor, he ordered divines of both parties to assemble in
his palace, and represented to them that Moses, who had received the law,
written with the hand of God, condemned, in the most explicit terms, those
who adored the works of men’s hands; that it was idolatry to worship them,
and great folly to attempt to confine the Infinite in a picture of the
size of an ell. It is said that the defenders of the images refused to
speak for the three following reasons:—1. That the canons prohibited to
doubt what had been determined by the second Council of Nice; 2. That the
clergy could not deliberate upon such matters in the imperial palace, but
in a church; and, 3. That the emperor was not a competent judge on this
occasion, because he was resolved to abolish the images. The emperor
deposed the patriarch, who defended the images, replacing him by another
who shared his own sentiments, and convened a council, which, with the
exception of a few of its members, decided for the abolition of the
images. The emperor ordered their removal, and sent several of their
defenders into exile; he soon, however, allowed them to return, and only
some few of the most zealous of them died in exile. The most celebrated of
these sufferers was Theodore Studites; and as he has obtained on this
account the honour of saintship, his opinions on the nature of images
deserve a particular notice. He maintained that as the shadow cannot be
separated from the body, as the rays of the sun are inseparable from that
planet, so the images are inseparable from the subjects which they
represent. He pretended that an image of Christ should be treated as if it
were Christ himself, saying, “_The image is nothing else than Christ
himself, except the difference of their essence; therefore, the worship of
the image is the worship of Jesus Christ_.” He considered those who were
removing images as “_destroyers of the incarnation of Christ, because he
does not exist if he cannot be painted_. We renounce Christ if we reject
his image; and refuse to worship him, if we refuse to adore his
image.”(60)
This defence of image-worship is, I think, a faithful exposition of the
anthropomorphistic ideas, which, as I have mentioned before, p. 9, had
been chiefly generated by the morbid imagination of the Egyptian monks,
and were supported by that numerous class, which formed the most zealous
and efficient defenders of the images. Leo V. was murdered in a church in
820; and Michael II., surnamed the Stammerer, whom the conspirators placed
on the throne, did not allow the images to be restored, though he was
moderate in his religious views. He recalled the defenders of the images
from exile, and seemed to steer a middle course between the enemies and
the defenders of images, though he shared the opinions of the former. He
was succeeded in 829 by his son, Theophilus,—a most decided opponent of
images,—and whose valour and love of justice are acknowledged by his
religious adversaries. He died in 841, leaving a minor son, Michael III.,
under the regency of his wife, Theodora. This princess, whose personal
character was irreproachable, governed the empire during thirteen years,
with considerable wisdom; but being an adherent of images, she restored
their worship,(61) which has since that time continued in the Greek Church
in perhaps even a more exaggerated form than in the Roman Catholic one,
and which can be without any impropriety called _iconolatry_, since
_idolatry_ may be perhaps considered as an expression too strong for ears
polite.
The struggle between the iconoclasts and the iconolaters, of which I have
given a mere outline, but which agitated the Eastern empire for nearly a
century and a half, ending in the complete triumph of the latter, deserves
the particular attention of all thinking Protestants; because it is
virtually the same contest that has been waged for more than three
centuries between Protestantism and Rome,(62) and which seems now to
assume a new phasis. I do not think that the ignorance of those times may
be considered as the principal cause of the triumph of the iconolatric
party, and that the spread of knowledge in our own day is a sufficient
safeguard against the recurrence of a similar contingency. There was in
the eighth and ninth centuries a considerable amount of learning at
Constantinople, where the treasures of classical literature, many of which
have since been lost, were preserved and studied.(63) The Greeks of that
time, though no doubt greatly inferior to the modern Europeans in physical
science, were not so in metaphysics and letters, whilst the gospel could
be read by all the educated classes in its original tongue, which was the
official, literary, and ecclesiastical language of the Eastern empire. The
Byzantine art was, moreover, very inferior to that of modern Europe, and
could not produce, except on some coarse and rustic intellects, that
bewitching effect, which the works of great modern painters and sculptors
often produce upon many refined and imaginative minds. It has been justly
remarked, by an accomplished writer of our day, that “the all-emancipating
press is occasionally neutralised by the soul-subduing miracles of
art.”(64)
The Roman Catholic Church perfectly understands this _soul-subduing_ power
of art, and the following is the exposition of her views on this subject
by one of her own writers, whom I have already quoted on a similar
subject, p. 51.
“That pictures and images in churches are particularly serviceable in
informing the minds of the humbler classes, and for such a purpose possess
a superiority over words themselves, is certain.
“Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem,
Quam quæ sunt oculis subjecta fldelibus et quæ
Ipse sibi tradit spectator.”
—_Horace de Arte Poetica_, v. 180.
“What’s through the ear conveyed will never find
Its way with so much quickness to the mind,
As that, when faithful eyes are messengers,
Unto himself the fixed spectator bears.”
“The remark of a heathen poet is corroborated by the observations of the
most celebrated amongst ancient and modern Christian writers. So persuaded
was St Paulinus of Nola, fourteen hundred years ago, of the efficacy
possessed by paintings for conveying useful lessons of instruction, that
he adorned with a variety of sacred subjects the walls of a church which
he erected, and dedicated to God in honour of St Felix.
“Prudentius assures us how much his devotion was enkindled, as he gazed
upon the sufferings of martyrs, so feelingly depicted around their tombs
and in their churches. On his way to Rome, about the year 405, the poet
paid a visit to the shrine of St Cassianus, at Forum Cornelii, the modern
Imola, where the body of that Christian hero reposed, under a splendid
altar, over which were represented, in an expressive picture, all the
sufferings of his cruel martyrdom.(65) So moved was Prudentius, that he
threw himself upon the pavement, kissed the altar with religious
reverence, and numbering up with many a tear those wounds that sin had
inflicted upon his soul, concluded by exhorting every one to unite with
himself in intrusting their petitions for the divine clemency to the
solicitude of the holy martyr Cassianus, who will not only hear our
request, but will afford us the benefit of his patronage.”(66)
The anecdote of Prudentius evidently proves that what originally had been
intended for the instruction of the people, may very easily become an
object of their adoration. If a man of a superior education, like
Prudentius,(67) could be carried away by his feelings in such a manner as
to address his prayers to a dead man, how much greater must be the effect
of images upon less cultivated minds! and I have related, p. 88, on the
authority of the great Roman Catholic historian, Fleury, that the fathers
of the second Council of Nice, who, according to the same authority, were
a very ignorant set, shed tears at the sight of an image represented in an
absurd and fictitious story.
Such are the effects produced in teaching religion by means of images.
There can be no doubt about the truth of the observations contained in the
lines of Horace, which the author of “Hierurgia” quotes in defence of
images; but these observations refer to the theatre, and it appears to me
that the application of purely scenic precepts to the house of God is
something very like converting divine service into a comedy.
The limits of this essay allow me not to discuss the chances of an
iconolatric reaction in our days. I shall only observe, that in several
countries where the iconoclasts of the Reformation had gained a
predominant position, they were entirely crushed by the iconolatric
reaction, and that a _fond alliance of females and monks_, supported by
the ruling powers of the state, achieved in these parts as great a victory
as that which it obtained in the east under Irene and Theodora, not only
over the reason of man, but even over the authority of the Word of God;
and I believe that the only human means of preventing similar
contingencies are free institutions, which allow the fullest liberty of
discussion in regard to all religious opinions.
I have said before, p. 82, that the Pope opposed the abolition of images
proclaimed by the Emperor Leo III., and that this opposition was shared by
the imperial provinces of Italy, which revolted on that occasion against
their sovereign, and separated from the Byzantine empire. It was therefore
natural that the second Council of Nice, which restored the worship of
images, should obtain the approbation of Pope Hadrian I.; but his desire
to impose the enactments of that council upon the churches of the West met
with a decided opposition on the part of Charlemagne. This great monarch,
who is so celebrated by his efforts to convert the Pagan Saxons,
prosecuted with all the barbarity of his age, and whom the church has
placed amongst her saints, was so offended by the enactments of the second
Council of Nice in favour of the worship of images, that he composed, or
what is more probable, ordered to be composed in his name, a book against
that worship, and sent it to Pope Hadrian I., as an exposition of his own
sentiments, as well as of those of his bishops, on the subject in
question. This work, though written in violent language, contains many
very rational views about images, and unanswerable arguments against all
kinds of adoration offered to them. The substance of this celebrated
protest is as follows:—
Charlemagne says, that there is no harm in having images in a church,
provided they are not worshipped; and that the Greeks had fallen into two
extremes, one of which was to destroy the images, as had been ordained by
the Council of Constantinople, under Constantine Copronymus, and the other
to worship them, as was decided by the second Council of Nice under Irene.
He censures much more severely this latter extreme than the former,
because those who destroyed images had merely acted with levity and
ignorance, whilst it was a wicked and profane action to worship them. He
compared the first to such as mix water with wine, and the others to those
who infuse a deadly poison into it; in short, there could be no comparison
between the two cases. He marks, with great precision, the different kinds
of worship offered to the images, rejecting all of them. The second
Council of Nice decided that this worship should consist of kisses and
genuflexions, as well as of burning incense and wax candles before them.
All these practices are condemned by Charlemagne, as so many acts of
worship offered to a created being. He addresses the defenders of the
worship of images in the following manner:—
“You who establish the purity of your faith upon images, go, if you like,
_and fall upon your knees and burn incense before them_; but with regard
to ourselves we shall seek the precepts of God in his Holy Writ. _Light
luminaries before your pictures_, whilst we shall read the Scriptures.
_Venerate, if you like, colours_; but we shall worship divine mysteries.
_Enjoy the agreeable sight of your pictures_; but we shall find our
delight in the Word of God. _Seek after figures which cannot either see,
or hear, or __ taste_; but we shall diligently seek after the law of God,
which is irreprehensible.” He further says:—“I see images which have such
inscriptions, as for instance St Paul, and I ask, therefore, those who are
involved in this great error, why they do call images _holy (sanctus)_,
and why they do not say, conformably to the tradition of the fathers, that
these are images of the _saints_? Let them say in what consists the
sanctity of the images? Is it in the wood which had been brought from a
forest in order to make them? Is it in the colours with which they are
painted, and which are often composed of impure substances? Is it in the
wax, which gets dirty?” He taunts the worshippers of images, pointing out
an abuse which even now is as inevitable as it was then. “If,” says he,
“two pictures perfectly alike, but of which one is meant for the Virgin
and the other for Venus, are presented to you, you will inquire which of
them is the image of the Virgin and which is that of Venus, because you
cannot distinguish them. The painter will call one of these pictures the
image of the Virgin, and it will be immediately put up in a _high place,
honoured, and kissed_; whilst the other, representing Venus, will be
thrown away with horror. These two pictures are, however, made by the same
hand, with the same brush, with the same colours; they have the same
features, and the whole difference between them lies in their
inscriptions. Why is the one received and the other rejected? It is not on
account of the sanctity which one of them has, and the other has not; it
is, then, on account of its inscription; and yet certain letters attached
to a picture cannot give it a sanctity which it otherwise had not.”
This work was published for the first time in 1549, by Tillet, Roman
Catholic bishop of Meaux in France, though under an assumed name, and it
has been reprinted several times. Its authenticity, which had been at
first impugned by some Roman Catholic writers, was finally established
beyond every dispute, and acknowledged by the most eminent writers of the
Roman Catholic Church, such as Mabillon, Sirmond, &c. It is a very
remarkable production, for it most positively rejects every kind of
worship offered to images, without making any difference between _Latria_
and _Dulia_, and I think that its republication might be of considerable
service at the present time.(68)
The Pope sent a long letter in answer to the protest of Charlemagne, which
did not, however, satisfy that monarch, because he convened in 794 a
council at Frankfort, at which he presided himself. This synod, composed
of three hundred bishops of France, Germany, and Spain, and at which two
legates of the Pope were present, condemned the enactment of the second
Council of Nice respecting the worship of images.
This decree of the Council of Frankfort is very important, because it not
only condemned the worship of images, but it virtually rejected the
infallibility of the Popes, as well as of the General Councils, since it
condemned what they had established.
The opposition to the worship of images continued amongst the Western
churches for some time after the death of Charlemagne. Thus an assembly of
the French clergy, held at Paris in 825, condemned the decree of the
second Council of Nice as decidedly as it was done by the work of
Charlemagne and the Council of Frankfort. Claudius, bishop of Turin, who
lived about that time, opposed the worship of images, which he removed
from his churches, calling those idolaters who adhered to this practice;
he also condemned the adoration of relics, of the figure of the cross,
&c.; and he was not inaptly called, on this account, by the Jesuit
historian Maimbourg, the first Protestant minister.
There are other traces of a similar opposition during the ninth century,
but it seems to have entirely disappeared in the tenth, and it was again
renewed by the Albigenses in the eleventh century. Their history, however,
is foreign to the object of the present essay; and I shall endeavour to
give in my next chapter a short sketch of the legends of the saints,
composed during the middle ages.
Chapter VI. Origin And Development Of The Pious Legends, Or Lives Of
Saints, During The Middle Ages.
A collection of the lives of the saints of the Roman Catholic calendar has
been accomplished by the Jesuits, and is well known as that of the
Bollandists, from the name of its first originator Bollandus. It extends
to fifty-three huge folios, though it has reached only to the middle of
October,(69) each day having a number of saints assigned to it for
commemoration. It contains, among a mass of the greatest absurdities, a
good deal of valuable information relating to the history of the middle
ages, particularly in respect to the customs and prevailing ideas of that
period. A great, if not the greatest part of the saints whose lives are
described in that collection have never existed, except in the imagination
of their biographers; and the best proof of this is that the learned
Benedictine monk, Dom Ruinart, an intimate friend and collaborator of the
celebrated Mabillon, has reduced the acts of martyrs, whom he considers as
true, to one moderate quarto, though the same work contains a refutation
of the Protestant Dodwell, who maintained that the number of the primitive
martyrs had been greatly exaggerated by their historians.(70)
The Christian church was already, at an early period of her existence,
disturbed by a great number of forgeries, relating to the history and
doctrine of our Lord and his disciples;(71) but the spirit in which they
were written, so contrary to that of the true Gospel, and the gross
absurdities which they contain, were convincing proofs of the apocryphal
character of those writings, which, consequently, were rejected as such
from the canon of Scripture. If the church could not escape such abuses at
a time when she was not yet infected by Pagan ideas and practices, she
became still more exposed to them after the abovementioned corruptions,
and when, as has already been said, p. 20, the Christian society was
invaded by whole populations, who, notwithstanding their abjuration of
heathenism, were Pagans in their manners, their tastes, their prejudices,
and their ignorance. There were, moreover, very great difficulties in
obtaining authentic information about the lives of the martyrs. I have
said, p. 3, that their memory was usually preserved in the churches to
which they had belonged. This was, however, entirely a local affair, and
though the report of such events had undoubtedly circulated amongst other
Christian congregations, there was no general register of martyrs
preserved by the whole church, which had no central point of union. The
means of communication between various places were, moreover, at that time
very imperfect, and this difficulty was increased by the persecutions to
which the primitive churches were often exposed. These persecutions
dispersed many churches, destroying their registers and other documents
belonging to them, whilst even a much greater number of them experienced a
similar calamity from the barbarian nations who successively invaded the
Roman empire. The accounts of the sufferings and death of the martyrs
rest, therefore, with the exception of some comparatively few
well-authenticated cases, upon the authority of vague and uncertain
traditions. These traditions were generally collected and put in writing
only centuries after the time when the event to which they relate had, or
is supposed to have taken place. It was therefore no wonder that the
subjects of many such accounts are purely imaginary. The nature of the
generality of these legends, or lives of martyrs and other saints, may be
judged of best from the following opinion expressed on this subject by a
Roman Catholic clergyman of unsuspected orthodoxy:—
“What shall I say of those saints of whose life we don’t know either the
beginning or the progress,—of those saints to whom so many praises are
given, though nobody knows anything about their end? Who may pray to them
to intercede for him, when it is impossible to know what degree of credit
they enjoy with God? We shall be obliged, indeed, to consider the most
part of the acts of martyrs, which are now produced with so much
confidence, as so many fables, and reject them as nothing better than
romances. It is true that their lives are written, like that of St
Ovidius, St Felicissimus, and St Victor! But, O God! what lives! what
libels! lives deserving a place in the Index of the Prohibited Books,
since they are filled with falsehoods, vain conjectures, or, to say the
least, are ascribing to unknown and apocryphal saints the true acts of the
most illustrious martyrs. Such things cannot but bring about a great
confusion in the history of the church, not to say in religion itself. It
is in this manner that the actions of St Felicissimus, who is generally
believed to have been a deacon to St Sixtus, are ascribed to a new
Felicissimus; and the virtues of St Victor of Milan are now given to a new
Victor, who has been recently brought to Paris. As regards the life of St
Ovidius, is there anything in it more than words and words? and can we
find in it anything solid? This little book speaks of a leaden plate upon
which the senatorial dignity and the year of this saint’s martyrdom are
inscribed. Why is not this inscription given? Why is not at least the
precise date of his martyrdom named? It is said that St Ovidius suffered
towards the end of the second century; is this the manner of fixing the
year of his death? No, no; the ancients did not mark the time in such a
manner; they did not take an uncertain century for the certain epoch of a
year. I am much afraid that this inscription is by no means so authentic
as people wish to persuade us. But there was found in his grave a little
glass vessel; a palm is engraved upon his sepulchre; and his skull has the
appearance of being pierced with a lance. Well, these marks may prove that
St Ovidius was a martyr; but are they sufficient to establish the truth of
his life, such as it has been published?”(72)
I would, however, observe, that many writers of the lives of saints,
without excepting those who are considered legitimate, have rendered
themselves guilty of something worse than the plagiarism of which the
learned Mabillon complains in the passage given above. They may be accused
of having blasphemously parodied the Scriptures, and particularly the
Gospels, by ascribing many of the miracles recorded in the Bible to the
subjects of their biographies. M. Maury, the French savant whom I have
already quoted (p. 11), has traced a great number of miracles ascribed to
various saints, which are nothing but imitations of this kind. This
sacrilegious plagiarism is not confined to the middle ages, but has been
practised in modern times, as is evident from the two following miracles
ascribed to the celebrated Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier, who died in 1552.
It is said that during his residence in Japan a woman of his acquaintance
lost her daughter, after having sought in vain during her illness for St
Francis, who was absent on some journey. At his return the bereaved mother
fell at his feet, and said, weeping, like Martha to our Saviour, “Lord, if
thou hadst been here, my daughter had not died,”—(John xi. 21.) The saint,
moved by the entreaties of the mother, ordered her to open the grave of
her daughter, and restored her to life. Another time the same saint said
to a father whose daughter had died, in the same manner as Jesus Christ
said to the centurion whose servant was sick, “Go thy way; thy daughter is
healed.”(73)
Had these miracles been performed in our part of the world, they would
have converted crowds of Protestants, and thus greatly advanced the
principal object of the order to which St Francis Xavier belonged; but the
air of Europe seems to have been unfavourable for such wonderful
experiments, since the good saint was obliged to betake himself to Japan
in order successfully to perform them.
It is true that the legend writers make no attempt at concealing these
imitations, but, on the contrary, insist upon the likeness of the miracles
performed by their saint to those of our Saviour, as a proof of the high
degree of sanctity attained by the former. No saint, however, of the Roman
Catholic or Græco-Russian calendar had so many miracles ascribed to him,
particularly of the kind mentioned above, as St Francis of Assisi, the
celebrated founder of the mendicant monks, and who, considering the
immense influence which his disciples have exercised on the Catholic
world, was perhaps one of the most extraordinary characters which the
middle ages produced.
It has been frequently observed, that genius is akin to madness, and that
the partition by which the two are separated is so thin that it
occasionally becomes quite imperceptible. Such a condition of the human
mind has perhaps never been exemplified in a more striking manner than by
the life of this famous saint, which presents a strange mixture of the
noblest acts of charity and self-devotion, the wildest freaks of a madman,
and of genial conceptions worthy of the most eminent statesman and
philosopher. The best proof of his genius is the great influence which the
order instituted by him has exercised during several centuries in many
countries, and which even now has not yet lost its vitality. It must also
be admitted, that neither St Francis nor his disciples can be charged with
any of those atrocities by which the life of his contemporary St Dominic,
of bloody memory, the founder of the inquisition, and the preacher of the
crusade against the Albigenses, as well as the annals of his order, are
stained. Neither can it be denied that Francis, as well as his followers,
have on many occasions mitigated the barbarity of their age. His immense
popularity is, however, as I think, chiefly due to the circumstance that
his order, principally destined to act upon the lower classes, was
recruited from the most numerous and most ignorant part of the population;
and is it necessary to observe that the less men are educated, the more
they are prone to credulity and exaggeration? Much learning was not
required for the admission to this democratic order, and its ranks were
increased by the creation of a class whose members remained in the world,
binding themselves only to the observation of some devotional practices
and moral precepts. All this contributed to spread the order of St
Francis, to which both sexes are admitted, with a marvellous rapidity over
many countries; at the same time its members were extolling the virtues
and supposed miracles of their founder in the most exaggerated and often
ludicrous manner, of which the following anecdote may serve as a
specimen:—A Franciscan monk, who was one day preaching about the merits of
the founder of his order, began his sermon in the following manner: “Where
shall I place the great St Francis? Amongst the saints? This is not enough
for his merits. Amongst the angels? no, ’tis not enough. Amongst the
archangels? ’tis not enough. Amongst the seraphims? ’tis not enough.
Amongst the cherubims? ’tis not enough.” He was, however, on a sudden
released, by one of his hearers, from his perplexity about a proper
location for his saint, who, rising from his seat, said, “Reverend father,
as I see that you cannot find for St Francis a proper place in heaven, I
shall give up to him mine on this bench;” which having said, he left the
church.
The story does not say whether this good monk was satisfied with the place
so unexpectedly offered to his saint, or where he would have stopped
without this timely interruption; but we know, from many other cases, that
St Francis was compared by his disciples to our Saviour. Thus, in a work
published by the Father Bartholomeus of Pisa, and entitled “The Golden
Book of the Conformities of the Life of St Francis with that of Jesus
Christ,”(74) the author maintains that the birth of St Francis was
announced by prophets; that he had twelve disciples, one of whom, called
John Capella, was rejected by him, like Judas Iscariot by our Lord; that
he had been tempted by the devil, but without success; that he was
transfigured; that he had suffered the same passion as our Saviour, though
he never was subject to any persecution or ill-usage, but died quietly, in
1218, amidst his devoted admirers. Other writers pushed even farther the
blasphemous comparison, boasting that St Francis had performed many more
miracles than our Lord, because Christ changed water into wine but once,
whilst St Francis did it thrice; and that instead of the few miraculous
cures mentioned in the Gospels, St Francis and his disciples had opened
the eyes of more than a thousand blind, cured more than a thousand lame,
and restored to life more than a thousand dead.
The greatest miracle, however, that has ever been wrought by St Francis
has taken place in our own days, and its authenticity admits of no doubt
whatever. It is a life of this famous saint, published by M. Chavin de
Malan; and my readers may form an adequate idea of its contents by the
following extract from an admirable article in the “Edinburgh Review” for
July 1847:—“Though amongst the most passionate and uncompromising devotees
of the Church of Rome, M. Chavin de Malan also is in one sense a
Protestant. He protests against any exercise of human reason in examining
any dogma which that church inculcates, or any fact which she alleges. The
most merciless of her cruelties affect him with no indignation, the
silliest of her prodigies with no shame, the basest of her superstitions
with no contempt. Her veriest dotage is venerable in his eyes. Even the
atrocities of Innocent III. seem to this all-extolling eulogist but to
augment the triumph and the glories of his reign. If the soul of the
confessor of Simon de Montfort, retaining all the passions and all the
prejudices of that era, should transmigrate into a doctor of the Sorbonne,
conversant with the arts and literature of our own times, the result might
be the production of such an ecclesiastical history as that of which we
have here a specimen,—elaborate in research, glowing in style, vivid in
portraiture, utterly reckless and indiscriminate in belief, extravagant up
to the very verge of idolatry in applause, and familiar far beyond the
verge of indecorum with the most awful topics and objects of the Christian
faith.”—(Pp. 1, 2.)(75)
Now, I ask my reader whether the publication of such a work, in the year
of grace 1845, at Paris, is not a perfect miracle, and undoubtedly much
more genuine than all those which it describes?
We live indeed in an age of wonders, physical as well as moral, and
neither of them have escaped the all-powerful influence of the great
moving spring of our time, and the principal cause of its rapid
advance,—_i.e._, competition. England, which is foremost in many, and not
behind in any, inventions and discoveries of the day, has maintained her
rank, and even perhaps gone ahead, in the production of such moral
miracles as that of which I have given a specimen above. And, indeed, the
lives of the English saints, published in the years 1844 and 1845, in the
capital of this Protestant country, may fearlessly challenge a comparison
with the work of M. Chavin de Malan. They are, moreover, ascribed to a
clergyman of the Church of England, who, though he has since gone over to
Rome, was at that time receiving the wages of the Protestant Establishment
of this country as one of its servants and defenders.(76) The few
following extracts from this curious work will enable my readers to judge
whether I have over-estimated the capabilities of this work for a
successful competition with its French rival:—
“Many of these (legends) are so well fitted to illustrate certain
principles which should be borne in mind in considering mediæval miracles,
that they deserve some attention. Not that any thing here said is intended
to _prove_ that the stories of miracles, said to be wrought in the middle
ages, are true. Men will always believe or disbelieve their truth, in
proportion as they are disposed to admit or reject the antecedent
probability of the existence of a perpetual church, endowed with unfailing
divine powers. And the reason of this is plain. Ecclesiastical miracles
presuppose Catholic faith, just as Scripture miracles, and Scripture
itself, presuppose the existence of God. Men, therefore, who disbelieve
the faith, will of course disbelieve the story of the miracles, which, if
it is not appealed to as a proof of the faith, at least takes it for
granted. For instance, the real reason for rejecting the account of the
vision which appeared to St Waltheof in the holy Eucharist, must be
disbelief of the Catholic doctrine.”(77)
The miracle alluded to above, and which cannot be rejected without
disbelief in the Catholic doctrine, is as follows:—“On Christmas-day, when
the convent was celebrating the nativity of our Lord, as the friar was
elevating the host, in the blessed sacrifice of the mass, he saw in his
hand a child fairer than the children of men, having on his head a crown
of gold studded with jewels. His eyes beamed with light, and his face was
more radiant than the whitest snow; and so ineffably sweet was his
countenance, that the friar kissed the feet and the hands of the heavenly
child. After this the divine vision disappeared, and Waltheof found in his
hands the consecrated water.”(78)
The whole collection is full of similar stories, some of which are really
outrageous; as, for instance, that which it relates about St Augustine,
the great apostle of England.
This saint was, during his peregrinations about the country, received with
great honours in the north of England; “but,” says the work in question,
“very different from this are the accounts of his travels in Dorsetshire.
While there, we hear of his having come to one village, where he was
received with every species of insult. The wretched people, not content
with heaping abusive words upon the holy visitors, assailed them with
missiles, in which work, the place being probably a sea-port, the sellers
of fish are related to have been peculiarly active. Hands, too, were laid
upon the archbishop and his company. Finding all efforts useless, the
godly company shook the dust from their feet, and withdrew. The
inhabitants are said to have suffered the penalty of their impieties, even
to distant generations. All the children born from that time bore and
transmitted the traces of their parents’ sins in the shape of a loathsome
deformity.”(79)
The writer who relates this story had not the courage or the honesty of M.
Chavin de Malan to tell that the insult offered to the holy visitors
consisted in attaching tails of fish to their robes, and that the
loathsome deformity, with which the children of the perpetrators of that
insult were born during many generations, was a tail.
Absurd as this monkish story is, it is nevertheless characteristic of the
spirit of the sacerdotal pride and vindictiveness which would punish a
silly joke, by which the dignity of the priestly order was offended, with
a heavy calamity, entailed upon the innocent descendants of its
perpetrators through many generations; and yet the fables of this modern
mythology cannot be, according to our author, rejected _without disbelief
of the Catholic doctrine_. This is not, however, his personal opinion; and
he has only asserted, in a more decisive manner than it has been done for
a considerable time, a principle which the Roman Catholic Church cannot
disavow, though it may place her in an embarrassing position; and as an
illustration of this, I shall give the following anecdote:—
Under the reign of Frederic II., a Prussian soldier stole a costly
ornament from an image of the Virgin, which enjoyed a great reputation for
its miraculous powers. The theft being discovered, the culprit pleaded in
his defence that, having addressed a fervent prayer to the above-mentioned
image for help in his poverty, it gave him this ornament to relieve him
from his distress. This affair was reported to the king, who, being much
amused by the soldier’s device, required the Roman Catholic bishop in
whose diocese this theft was committed to give a positive opinion whether
the image in question could work miracles of this kind or not? The bishop
could not, without showing _disbelief in the Catholic doctrine_, deny the
possibility of the miracle, and was therefore obliged to give an
affirmative reply. The king, therefore, pardoned the soldier, on condition
of never accepting presents from this or any other image or saint
whatever.
The author of this essay, though a firm believer in the existence of God
and the truth of the Scriptures, has not the advantage of being inspired
with faith in the Catholic doctrine; he therefore will continue his
researches in the same manner as before.
Many legends originated from misunderstanding the emblematic character of
some pictures. Thus the celebrated Spanish lady saint and authoress, St
Theresa, was, on account of her eloquent and impassioned effusions of love
addressed to the Deity, painted by a Spanish artist having her heart
pierced with an arrow, in allusion to the words of the Psalmist, “For
thine arrows stick fast in me,” &c.—(Ps. xxxviii. 2.) She died quietly in
her convent towards the end of the sixteenth century, and though the
particulars of her life and death are generally known, there were some
legend writers who related that she died a martyr, pierced by an arrow. If
such confusion of ideas could happen in a time when literature and science
had made considerable progress, and when the art of printing was already
universally known, how much more frequently such things must have occurred
during the prevailing ignorance of the middle ages! And, indeed, there are
many wild legends which have originated from a similar source, and of
which the most celebrated is that of St Denis, which has been also related
of other saints. This martyr, supposed to have been beheaded, was
represented holding his head in his hand, as an emblem of the manner of
his death. The writer of his legend took this emblem for the
representation of a real fact, and loosening the reins of his imagination,
related that the saint, after having been beheaded, took up his head,
kissed it, and walked away with it.(80)
It is a general tendency of a gross and unenlightened mind to materialise
the most abstract and spiritual ideas, and then what is simply an allegory
becomes with him a reality. It was this tendency which, during the
mediæval ignorance, gave often a literal sense to what is only typical,
and it was carried so far that even the parables of our Lord were
constructed into real stories. Thus, Lazarus was a poor saint who lived in
great want, and was made after his death the patron of beggars and lepers.
The parable of the prodigal son has furnished materials for many a legend;
and to crown all these pious parodies, a monk has shown to the well-known
Eastern traveller Hasselquist, the very spot upon which the good Samaritan
assisted the wounded man, who had been left unheeded by the priest and the
Levite. Future rewards and punishments, heaven and hell, were also
represented in a grossly material manner, that gave rise to many absurd
legends, generally invented with the object of supporting the pretensions
of the church, to have the power of sending at pleasure the souls of the
departed to either of these places.(81)
I have already spoken of the effects which the solitary and ascetic life
of the early monks produced upon their imagination. The same thing took
place amongst the recluses of the convents, but particularly nunneries.
“The imaginations of women,” says a celebrated author whom I have already
quoted, “as their feelings are more keen and exquisite, are more
susceptible and ungovernable than those of men; more obnoxious to the
injurious influence of solitude; more easily won upon by the arts of
delusion, and inflamed by the contagion of the passions.” Hence we may
account for the rapidity with which in orphan houses, cloisters, and other
institutions, where numbers of the sex are intimately connected with each
other, the sickness, humour, habits, of one, if conspicuous and
distinguished, become those of all. I remember to have read in a medical
writer of considerable merit, that in a French convent of nuns, of more
than common magnitude, one of the sisters was seized with a strange
impulse to mew like a cat, in which singular propensity she was shortly
imitated by several other sisters, and finally, without a solitary
exception, by the whole convent, who all joined at regular periods in a
general mew that lasted several hours. The neighbourhood heard, with more
astonishment than edification, the daily return of this celestial
symphony, which was silenced, after many ineffectual measures, by
terrifying the modesty of the sex with the menace, that, on any future
repetition of their concert, a body of soldiers, pretended to be stationed
at the gates of the monastery, would be called in to inflict upon them a
discipline at once shameful and severe.
“Among all the epidemic fancies of the sex I have found upon record, none
equals that related by Cardan to have displayed itself in the fifteenth
century,—which forcibly illustrates what has been remarked of the
intuitive contagion by which fantastic affection is propagated among
women. A nun in a certain German convent was urged by an unaccountable
impulse to bite all her companions; and her strange caprice gradually
spread to others, till the whole body was infected by the same fury. Nor
did the evil confine itself within these limits: the report of this
strange mania travelled from one province to another, and every where
conveyed with it the infectious folly, from cloister to cloister, through
the German empire; from thence extending itself on each side to Holland
and Italy, the nuns at length worried one another from Rome to Amsterdam.
“Numberless instances might be quoted to demonstrate the force with which
the strangest and most wild propensities fasten themselves on the
imagination, and conquer and tyrannise over the will, when the soul is
debarred from a free intercourse with its species, and left too
uninterruptedly to its own unbridled musings. But those which we have
related may be sufficient to show the danger into which he runs who
delivers himself unconditionally to the custody of solitude, and does not
arm himself against its faithless hospitality. Shut up in a barren and
monotonous leisure, without studies to occupy curiosity, without objects
to amuse the senses, or to interest and to attract the affections to any
thing human, fancy will escape into the worlds of chimerical existence,
there to seek amusement and exercise. How fondly does it then embrace and
cherish angelical visions, or infernal phantoms, prodigies, or miracles!
or should its reveries take another direction, with what increasing
eagerness and confidence do its hopes hunt after the delusions of alchemy,
the fictions of philosophy, and the delirium of metaphysics! In cases
where the mind is less capacious, and its stores less copious, it will
attach itself to some absurd notion, the child of its languid and
exhausted powers; and bestowing its fondest confidence on this darling of
its dotage, will abandon reason and outrage common sense.”(82)
I have given this lengthened extract from Zimmerman, because I think it
satisfactorily explains those mystic _visions_ as well as _infernal
phantoms_, with which the mediæval legends and chronicles, generally
composed by monks, abound, and which are often unjustly ascribed to fraud
and wilful deception. Medical science, as well as all the branches of
natural philosophy, being then in a very imperfect condition, such
phenomena as those of nuns mewing like cats or biting like dogs, which are
mentioned by Zimmerman, were not explained as nervous diseases, but
ascribed to the possession of evil spirits; and I frankly confess that I
am by no means sure, that if cases like those mentioned above were to
happen in our enlightened age, there would not be found many good folks
ascribing them to a similar agency. It must be also remembered that, if
notwithstanding the extreme rapidity and regularity of communications in
our own time, reports of various events are often exaggerated and even
completely altered in passing from one place to another; how much more
must it have been the case during the time of such defective communication
as existed previous to the invention of printing and the introduction of
the post! It was therefore no wonder if occurrences of such an
extraordinary nature as those alluded to were immensely magnified by
report, and if it had, at least in many places, converted the mewing and
biting nuns into as many cats and dogs. It is, moreover, now generally
admitted that what is called mesmerism, but whose real nature science has
not yet explained, was known and practised during the middle ages, as well
as in remote antiquity, and that many thaumaturgic operations, described
by the mediæval legends, as well as by ancient writers, were produced by
means of this still mysterious agency.
I have dwelt perhaps too long on this subject, because I am afraid that
the observations relating to it are not confined to a distant period, but
may become but too often applicable to our own times. And, indeed, when we
reflect on the rapid increase of convents and nunneries, particularly in
this country, and that notwithstanding the present state of civilization
these establishments must be filled chiefly by individuals whose
imaginations are stronger than their reasoning powers, there can be little
doubt that they may again become the stage of those extraordinary
manifestations, the cause of which had been too exclusively ascribed to
mediæval darkness. It cannot be doubted, that designing individuals of
both sexes, possessed of superior talents and knowledge, but particularly
endowed with a strong will, may exercise not only an undue influence, but
even an absolute power over the inmates of the above-mentioned monastic
establishments; and that a skilful application of mesmerism may
efficiently promote such unlawful ends.
Many local superstitious remains of Paganism,—as, for instance, miraculous
powers ascribed to certain wells, stones, caverns,—stories about various
kinds of fairies, &c.—have furnished ample materials to the mediæval
legend writers, who arranged them according to their own views. They
generally retained the miraculous part of the story, frequently
embellishing it by their own additions, but substituting the agency of the
Christian saint, the hero of their tale, for that of the Pagan deity, to
whom it had originally been ascribed. It was thus that the localities
considered by the Pagans as possessed of some supernatural properties, and
resorted to by them on this account, were converted into places of
Christian pilgrimages, with the only difference that the Pagan _genius
loci_ was baptised with the name of a Christian saint, whose existence can
often be no more proved than that of his heathen predecessor. Many
hagiographers seem to have indulged their humour as much as their fancy in
composing these legends, which appears from such ludicrous stories as, for
instance, that of St Fechin, whose piety was so fervent that when he was
bathing in cold water it became almost boiling hot. This warm-hearted or
hot-headed saint is said to have belonged to the Emerald isle, though,
considering that his ardent piety was so very much like a manifestation of
the _perfervidum Scotorum ingenium_, in a somewhat exaggerated form, I am
much inclined to believe him a native of the north country. There are many
instances of such humorous miracles, but I shall quote only that of
Laurenthios, a famous Greek saint, and worker of miracles. Having one day
some business with the Patriarch of Constantinople, he was kept waiting in
the prelate’s ante-chamber, and feeling very warm he wanted to take off
his cloak. But as there was not any piece of furniture in the room, nor
even a peg on its walls, St Laurenthios, embarrassed what to do with his
cloak, threw it upon a ray of the sun, which was entering the room through
a hole in the shutter, and which immediately acquired the firmness of a
rope, so that the saint’s cloak remained hanging upon it. It must not,
however, be believed that the hot sun and fervid imagination of Greece
were absolutely requisite for the performance of such wonderful tricks;
for we have sufficient legendary evidence to prove that they were
successfully reproduced under the less brilliant sky of Germany and
France, because St Goar of Treves suspended his cap, and St Aicadrus,
abbot of Jumieges, his gloves upon the same piece of furniture that had
been used by St Laurenthios to hang his cloak, though probably,
considering that the sun is not so powerful in those countries as it is at
Constantinople, the western saints did not venture to try its rays with
such a heavy load, as had been successfully done by their eastern
colleague.
Some miracles were invented in order to inculcate implicit obedience to
the ecclesiastical authorities, which is considered by the Roman Catholic
Church as one of, if not the most important virtue to be practised by her
children. Thus it is related that when the Spanish Dominican monk, St
Vincent Ferrerius, celebrated for the great number of his miracles, was
one day walking along a street in Barcelona, a mason, falling from a high
roof, called for his assistance. The saint answered that he could not
perform a miracle without the permission of his superior, but that he
would go and ask for it. The mason remained, therefore, suspended in the
air until St Vincent, returning with the permission, got him safely down
on the ground.
It must be admitted, that many saints, whose lives are disfigured by
absurd stories of their miracles, were men of great piety, adorned with
the noblest virtues, and who gave proofs of the most exalted charity and
self-devotion. Unfortunately the honours of saintship have been often
bestowed upon such sanguinary monsters as St Dominic, whose shrine would
be the most appropriately placed in a temple where human sacrifices are
offered, or upon madmen who have outraged every feeling of humanity. Thus
it is related that St Alexius left his home on the day of his wedding,
and, having exchanged his clothes for the rags of a beggar, adopted his
mode of life. After some time, when his appearance had become so wretched
that he could no longer be recognised by his friends, he returned to his
parental house, asking for shelter. He obtained a place under the
staircase, and lived there by alms for seventeen years, continually
witnessing the distress and lamentations of his wife, mother, and aged
father about his loss, and was recognised only after his death by a book
of prayers which had been given him by his mother. And it was for this
unfeeling and even cruel treatment of his own family that he was
canonised! It is supposed, however, that all this story is but a fiction,
and, for the sake of humanity, I sincerely hope that it is so.
The limits of this essay allow me not farther to extend my researches
about the legends of mediæval saints, and their miracles; and I shall try
to give in my next chapter a short analysis of several practices which the
Roman Catholic as well as the Græco-Russian Church have retained from
Paganism.
Chapter VII. Analysis Of The Pagan Rites And Practices Which Have Been
Retained By The Roman Catholic As Well As The Græco-Russian Church.
I have given (p. 14) the opinion of an eminent Roman Catholic modern
author (Chateaubriand) about the introduction of Pagan usages into the
Christian worship, and a long extract (pp. 16-28) from another no less
distinguished Roman Catholic writer of our day, describing the cause of
this corruption. The Roman Catholic writers of this country do not,
however, treat this subject with the same sincerity as the illustrious
author of the “Genie du Christianisme,” and the learned French Academician
from whose work I have so largely drawn; but they try hard to deny that
many usages of their church bear the stamp of Paganism.(83) This is
particularly the case with the author of “Hierurgia,” a work which I have
already quoted, and which may be considered as the fairest expression of
what the Roman Catholic Church teaches on the subject in question. Thus
the use of images in churches is represented as being authorised by
Scripture, by the following curious arguments:—
“The practice of employing images as ornaments and memorials to decorate
the temple of the Lord is in a most especial manner approved by the Word
of God himself. Moses was commanded to place two cherubim upon the ark,
and to set up a brazen figure of the fiery serpent, that those of the
murmuring Israelites who had been bitten might recover from the poison of
their wounds by looking on the image. In the description of Solomon’s
temple, we read of that prince, not only that he made in the oracle two
cherubim of olive tree, of ten cubits in height, but that ‘all the walls
of the temple round about he carved with divers figures and carvings.’
“In the first book of Paralipomenon (Chronicles) we observe that when
David imposed his injunction upon Solomon to realise his intention of
building a house to the Lord, he delivered to him a description of the
porch and temple, and concluded by thus assuring him: ‘All these things
came to me written by the hand of the Lord, that I may understand the
works of the pattern.’
“The isolated fact that images were not only directed by the Almighty God
to be placed in the Mosaic tabernacle, and in the more sumptuous temple of
Jerusalem, but that he himself exhibited the pattern of them, will be
alone sufficient to authorise the practice of the Catholic Church in
regard to a similar observance.”—(_Hierurgia_, p. 371.)
All this may be briefly answered. There was no representation of the
Jewish patriarchs or saints either in the tabernacle or in the temple of
Solomon, as is the case with the Christian saints in the Roman Catholic
and Græco-Russian Churches; and the brazen serpent, to which the author
alludes, was broken into pieces by order of King Hezekiah as soon as the
Israelites began to worship it.
The author tries to prove, with considerable learning and ingenuity, that
the primitive Christians ornamented their churches with images, and I have
already given, p. 51, his explanation of the Council of Elvira; but his
assertions are completely disproved by every direct evidence which we have
about the places of worship of those Christians. I have already quoted, p.
7, the testimony of Minutius Felix, that the Christians had no kind of
simulachres in their temples, as well as the indignation of St Epiphanius
at an attempt to introduce them into the churches, p. 68, and for which
there would have been no occasion if it had been an established custom.
The most important part of his defence of the use of images is, however,
the paragraph entitled, “_No virtue resident in images themselves_,”
containing what follows:—
“Not only are Catholics not exposed to such dangers (_i.e._, idolatry),
but they are expressly prohibited by the church (_Concilium Tridentinum_,
sess. xxv.) to believe that there is any divinity or virtue resident in
images for which they should be reverenced, or that any thing is to be
asked of them, or any confidence placed in them, but that the honour given
should be referred to those whom they represent; and so particular are
their religious instructors in impressing this truth upon the minds of
their congregations, that if a Catholic child, who had learned its first
catechism, were asked if it were permitted to pray to images, the child
would answer, ‘No, by no means; for they have no life nor sense to help
us;’ and the pastor who discovered any one rendering any portion of the
respect which belongs to God alone to a crucifix or to a picture, would
have no hesitation in breaking the one and tearing the other into shreds,
and throwing the fragments into the flames, in imitation of Ezechias, who
broke the brazen serpent on account of the superstitious reverence which
the Israelites manifested towards it.”—(_Hierurgia_, p. 382.)
It is perfectly true that the Council of Trent has declared that the
images of Christ, of the virgin, and of other saints, are to be honoured
and venerated, not because it is believed that there is any divinity or
virtue inherent in them, or that any thing is to be asked of them, or any
confidence placed in images, as had been done by Pagans, who put their
trust in idols (Psalm cxxxv. 15-18), but that “the honour given should be
referred to those whom they represent, so that by the images which we
kiss, before which we uncover our heads, or prostrate ourselves
(_procumbimus_), we worship Christ and the saints whose likeness those
images represent.”(84) But if there is “no divinity or virtue resident in
images,” as is declared by the Council of Trent, what is to become of all
those miraculous images which are the subject of pilgrimage in so many
Roman Catholic countries, and the existence of whose miraculous powers has
been solemnly acknowledged by the highest ecclesiastical authorities? I
shall not attempt to enumerate those miraculous images, because their
number is legion, but I shall only ask the rev. doctor whether he
considers the image of the virgin of Loretto, which is the object of so
many pilgrimages, and to which so many miracles are ascribed, as having
some virtue resident in it or not? and would he break it in pieces on
account of the miraculous powers ascribed to it? Is he prepared to act in
such a manner with the celebrated _Bambino_(85) of Rome? and are the
miraculous powers ascribed to it, as well as to the virgin of Loretto, and
other images of this kind, a reality or an imposture? and, finally, what
will he do with the winking Madonna of Rimini, which has lately made so
much noise, and which, instead of being broken to pieces or torn to shreds
by the priests or the bishop of the place, has been approved by
ecclesiastical authority? I can assure the rev. doctor, that by breaking
into pieces the miraculous images, carved as well as painted, he will
break down many barriers which now separate the Protestant Christians from
those who belong to his own church. I am, however, afraid that he will
find many difficulties in attempting such a thing; and I must remind him,
that in quoting the above-mentioned canon of the Council of Trent, he
forgot an essential part of it, which greatly modifies the declaration
that there is _no divinity or virtue resident in images_, saying, “That
the holy synod ordains that no one be allowed to place, or cause to be
placed, any _unusual_ image(86) in any place or church, howsoever
exempted, except that the image be approved by the bishop: also, that no
new miracles are to be acknowledged or new relics recognised, unless the
said bishop has taken cognizance and approved thereof, who, as soon as he
has obtained certain information in regard to these matters, shall, after
having taken the advice of theologians and of other pious men, act therein
as he shall judge to be consonant with truth and piety.”—(Sess. xxviii.,
&c.)
The real meaning of the above-mentioned canon of the Council of Trent is
therefore, I think, that there is no divinity or virtue resident in the
images which are not authorised by the bishop to work miracles, and that
_unlicensed_ images are not allowed to have any such divinity or virtue in
them, but that such _unusual_ carved or painted images, as those which I
have mentioned above, having obtained the required authorization, may work
as many miracles as they please, or as their worshippers will believe.
It has been observed by a writer, who certainly cannot be accused of
violent opinions, the learned and pious Melancthon, “that it was impious
and idolatrous to address statues or bones, and to suppose that either the
Divinity or the saints were attached to a certain place or to a certain
statue more than to other places; and that there was no difference between
the prayers which are addressed to the Virgin of Aix la Chapelle, or to
that of Ratisbon, and the Pagan invocations of the Ephesian Diana, or the
Platean Juno, or any other statue.”(87) To these observations I shall only
add those of M. Beugnot, which I have given p. 27, on the marvellous
facility with which the worship of the virgin, established by the Council
of Ephesus, 431, has superseded that of the Pagan deities in many
countries.
There is scarcely any ceremony in the Western as well as in the Eastern
church, the origin of which cannot be traced to the Pagan worship. I shall
limit my observations on this subject to the three following objects,
which constitute the most important elements in the divine service
performed in those churches, namely,—1. The consecrated water; 2. Lamps
and candles; and, 3. Incense; giving the Roman Catholic explanation of
their origin, as well as that which I believe to be true.
With regard to the consecrated water, it is described by the author of
“Hierurgia” in the following manner:—
“The ordinance of Almighty God, promulgated by the lips of Moses,
concerning the _water of separation_, and the mode of sprinkling it, are
minutely noticed in the nineteenth chapter of the book of Numbers. In the
book of Exodus, we read that the Lord issued the following declarations to
Moses:—‘Thou shalt make a brazen laver, with its foot, to wash in; and
thou shalt set it between the tabernacle of the testimony and the altar.
And the water being put into it, Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands
and feet in it when they are going into the tabernacle of the testimony,
and when they are to come to the altar to offer incense on it to the
Lord.’—(Exod. xxx. 18-20.)
“That it was a practice with the Jews, not only peculiar to the members of
the priesthood, but observed amongst the people, for each individual to
wash his hands before he presumed to pray, is a well-attested fact. The
church adopted this as well as several other Jewish ceremonies, which she
engrafted on her ritual; and St Paul apparently borrows from such ablution
the metaphor which he employs while thus admonishing his disciple
Timothy:—‘I will that men pray in every place, lifting up pure hands.’—(1
Timothy ii. 8.) That in the early ages the faithful used to wash their
hands at the threshold of the church before they entered, is expressly
mentioned by a number of writers.”
As to the use of holy water being of apostolic origin, he says:—
“The introduction of holy or blessed water must be referred to the times
of the apostles. That it was the custom, in the very first ages of the
church, not only to deposit vessels of water at the entrance of those
places where the Christians assembled for the celebration of divine
worship, but also to have vases containing water mingled with salt, both
of which had been separated from common use, and blessed by the prayers
and invocations of the priest, is certain. A particular mention of it is
made in the constitution of the apostles; and the pontiff Alexander, the
first of that name, but the sixth in succession from St Peter, whose chair
he mounted in the year 109, issued a decree by which the use of holy water
was permitted to the faithful in their houses.”—(_Hierurgia_, pp.
461-463.)
It is rather a strange thing for Christians to imitate the religious rites
of the Jews, whose ceremonial law,—“which stood only in meats and drinks,
and divers _washings_, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the
time of reformation” (Heb. ix. 10),—was abolished by the New Testament.
However, if this is to be done, why is not the holy water adopted by the
Roman Catholic Church prepared in the same manner, and used for the same
object, as the Jewish _water of separation_, described in Numbers xix.,
but, on the contrary, composed in the same manner, and employed for the
same purpose, as the _lustral_ water of the Pagans? The fact is, that it
has been borrowed from the Pagan worship and not from the Jewish
ceremonial law, the truth of which is honestly acknowledged by the Jesuit
La Cerda, who, in a note on the following passage of Virgil,—
“Idem ter socios pura circumtulit unda,
Spargens rore levi, et ramo felicis olivæ,
Lustravitque viros”
—_Æneid_, lib. vi. 229—
says, “_Hence was derived the custom of the holy church to provide
purifying or holy water at the entrance of their churches_.”(88) The same
custom was observed in the Pagan temples, at the entrance of which there
was a vase containing the holy or _lustral_ water, for the people to
sprinkle themselves with, just as is now done at the entrance of the Roman
Catholic churches. The author of “Hierurgia” mentions, as quoted above,
that Pope Alexander I. authorised, in the beginning of the second century,
the use of holy water; and yet Justin Martyr, who wrote about that time,
says “that it was invented by demons, in imitation of the true baptism
signified by the prophets, that their votaries might also have their
pretended purification by water.”(89) And the Emperor Julian, in order to
vex the Christians, caused the victuals in the markets to be sprinkled
with holy water, with the intention of either starving them or compelling
them to eat what they considered as impure.(90)
To these evidences of the abomination in which the primitive Christians
held the Pagan rite of sprinkling with holy water, I may add the following
anecdote, characteristic of the intensity of this feeling:—
When Julian the Apostate was one day going to sacrifice in the temple of
Fortune, accompanied by the usual train of the emperors, the Pagan
priests, standing on both sides of the temple gate, sprinkled those who
were entering it with the lustral or holy water in order to purify them
according to the rites of their worship. A Christian tribune, or superior
officer of the imperial guards (_scutarii_), who, being on duty, preceded
the monarch, received some drops of this holy water on his _chlamys_ or
coat, which made him so indignant, that, notwithstanding the presence of
the emperor, he struck the priest who had thus sprinkled him, exclaiming
that he did not purify but pollute him. Julian ordered the arrest of the
officer who had thus insulted the rites of his religion, giving him the
choice either to sacrifice to the gods or to leave the army. The bold
Christian chose the latter, but was soon restored to his rank on account
of his great military talents, and raised, after the death of Julian and
the short reign of Jovian, to the imperial throne as Valentinian I.(91)
This monarch was, however, by no means a bigot; on the contrary, we have
the unsuspected testimony of the contemporary Pagan writer Ammianus
Marcellinus that he maintained a strict impartiality between the
Christians and Pagans, and did not trouble any one on account of his
religion. He even regulated and confirmed, by a law in 391, the privileges
of the Pagan clergy in a more favourable manner than had been done by many
of his predecessors; and yet this monarch, who treated his Pagan subjects
with such an extreme liberality, committed, when a private individual, an
act of violence against their worship which exposed him to considerable
danger. This, I think, is a strong proof of the horror which the
Christians felt for a rite which constitutes now an indispensable part of
the service in the Western as well as in the Eastern churches, and is most
profusely used by them.
With regard to the candles and lamps, which form a no less important and
indispensable part of the worship adopted by the above-mentioned churches,
the author of “Hierurgia” defends their use in the following manner:—
After having described the candlesticks employed in the Jewish temple, he
says:—“But without referring to the ceremonial of the Jewish temple, we
have an authority for the employment of light in the functions of religion
presented to us in the Apocalypse. In the first chapter of that mystic
book, St John particularly mentions the golden candlesticks which he
beheld in his prophetic vision in the isle of Patmos. By commentators on
the sacred Scripture, it is generally supposed that the Evangelist, in his
book of the Apocalypse, adopted the imagery with which he represents his
mystic revelations from the ceremonial observed in his days by the church
for offering up the mass, or eucharistic sacrifice of the Lamb of God,
Christ Jesus.
“That the use of lights was adopted by the church, especially at the
celebration of the sacred mysteries, as early as the times of the
apostles, may likewise, with much probability, be inferred from that
passage in their Acts which records the preaching and miracles of St Paul
at Troas:—‘And on the first day of the week, when we were assembled to
break bread, Paul discoursed with them, being to depart on the morrow, and
he continued his speech until midnight. And there were a great number of
lamps in the upper chamber where we were assembled.’—(Acts xx. 7, 8.) That
the many lamps, so particularly noticed in this passage, were not
suspended merely for the purpose of illuminating, during the night-time,
this upper chamber, in which the faithful had assembled on the first day
of the week to break bread, but also to increase the solemnity of that
function and betoken a spiritual joy, may be lawfully inferred from every
thing we know about the manners of the ancient Jews, from whom the church
borrowed the use of lights in celebrating her various rites and
festivals.”—(_Hierurgia_, p. 372.)
It is really difficult seriously to answer such extraordinary suppositions
as that the seven candlesticks, expressly mentioned as types of the seven
churches, should be an allusion to the physical lights used in the worship
of those churches, and not to the moral and spiritual light which they
were spreading amongst Jews and Gentiles. Such an explanation appears to
me nothing better than that tendency to materialise the most abstract and
spiritual ideas to which I have alluded above, p. 126. With regard to the
passage in the Acts xx. 7, 8, which says that there were a great number of
lamps in the upper chamber where St Paul was preaching, I think that this
circumstance might have been considered as a religious rite if the apostle
had been preaching at noon; but as it is expressly said that he did it at
night, nothing can be more simple than the lighting of the upper chamber
with lamps. It was also very natural that there should be many of them,
because as St Paul was undoubtedly often referring to the Scriptures, his
hearers, or at least many of them, being either real Jews or Hellenists,
must have been continually looking to copies of the Bible in order to
verify his quotation. It was, therefore, necessary to have the room well
lighted, and consequently to employ many lamps. It is, indeed, curious to
see to what far-fetched suppositions a writer of so much learning and
ingenuity as Dr Rock is obliged to recur, in order to defend a purely
Pagan rite which has been adopted by his church, giving the simplest and
clearest things a _non-natural sense_, similar to that which some
Romanising clergymen have been giving to the precepts of a church which
they were betraying whilst in her service and pay.
The same author maintains that lights were employed from primitive times
at divine service, saying:—
“The custom of employing lights, in the earlier ages of the church, during
the celebration of the eucharist; and other religious offices, is
authenticated by those venerable records of primitive discipline which are
usually denominated Apostolic Canons.”—(_Hierurgia_, p. 393.)
Now, what is the authenticity of these canons? The author himself gives us
the best answer to it, saying:—
“Though these canons be apocryphal, and by consequence not genuine,
inasmuch as they were neither committed to writing by the apostles
themselves, nor penned by St Clement, to whom some authors have attributed
them; still, however, this does not prevent them from being true and
authentic, since they embody the traditions descended from the apostles
and the apostolic fathers, and bear a faithful testimony that the
discipline which prevailed during the first and second centuries was
established by the apostles.”—(P. 394.)
I shall not enter into a discussion about the value of evidence furnished
by a work which is acknowledged to be apocryphal, and not to have been
written by those to whom its defenders had ascribed its authorship;(92)
but I shall only remark, that one of the most eminent fathers of the
church, the learned Lactantius, who flourished in the fourth century, and
consequently long after the time when the Apostolic Canons are supposed to
have been composed, takes a very different view from them in regard to
this practice, because he positively says, in attacking the use of lights
by the Pagans, _they light up candles to God as if he
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