The Century of Columbus Part 40

Paulsen insists that exactly the opposite is true, and that far from bringing freedom of thought, the new religious movement still further shackled university and teaching freedom and the liberty of speech and writing, so that a sadly stilted period of educational development comes on the scene in Germany. He talks from the standpoint of his own department of philosophy, and evidently resents the shackles that were placed on freedom of speculation at this period.

"During this period also a more determined effort was made to control instruction than at any period before or since. The fear of heresy, the extra anxiety to keep instruction well within orthodox lines, was not less intense at the Lutheran than at the Catholic inst.i.tutions--perhaps it was even more so, because here doctrine {556} was not so well established, apostasy was possible in either of two directions, Catholicity or Calvinism. Even the philosophic faculty felt the pressure of this demand for correctness of doctrines. Thus came about these restrictions within the petty States and their narrow-minded established churches, which well-nigh stifled the intellectual life of the German people."

A good deal of the misunderstanding of the effect of the reform movement on education is due to the fact that the novelty of the reformers' doctrines in religion and theology led to the use sometimes of the term, the New Learning, for their teaching. The same term, however, had come to be used for the study of the Latin and Greek cla.s.sics, and the supposed opposition of the Church to the humanistic teachings is founded on the confusion of these two terms. Of course the ecclesiastics of the old Church opposed the New Learning in as far as it related to the reformers' doctrines with regard to free will, the lack of merit in good works and denials of other religious doctrines. They were, however, the most ardent patrons of the New Learning in as far as that term may be applied to the study of the cla.s.sics. As a matter of fact, the Jesuits, founded at this time, based all their teaching on the cla.s.sics and their schools spread all over Europe.

As to the lack of interest in books, in education, in scholars.h.i.+p, even in the preservation of the great monuments of national literature after the change of religion in England, the easiest way to know it is to read Bishop Bale's account of what happened to the valuable books which had belonged to the old monastic and educational inst.i.tutions at the Reformation. He approved of the suppression of the monasteries and was an ardent reformer, but he cannot help calling attention to the absolute neglect of the treasures of literature, not only on the part of the n.o.bility and the common people, but on the part of the very universities themselves. It is easy to understand what an awful state of affairs there must have been to draw this indignant protest from so good a king's man and follower of the new order and protestant against everything Catholic. Bishop Bale said, in his preface to Leland's "New Year's Gift to Henry VIII," in 1549:

"Never had we been offended for the loss of our libraries, being so many in number and in so desolate places, for the more part, if the chief monuments and most notable works of our excellent writers had been preserved. If there had been in every s.h.i.+re of England but one solemn library for the preservation of those n.o.ble works and preferment of good learning in our posterity, it had been yet somewhat. But to destroy all without consideration, a great number of them which purchased those superst.i.tions mansions reserved of those library books . . . some to scour their candlesticks, and some to rub their boots. Some they sold to the grocers and soap-sellers, and some over sea to the book-binders, not in small number, but at times whole s.h.i.+ps full to the wondering of {557} the foreign nations. Yea, the universities of this realm are not all clear in this detestable fact. But cursed is . . .(he) which seeketh to be fed with such unG.o.dly gains and so deeply shameth his natural country. I know a merchant man, which shall at this time be nameless, that bought the contents of two n.o.ble libraries for forty s.h.i.+llings' price, a shame it is to be spoken. This stuff hath he occupied in the stead of gray paper by the s.p.a.ce of more than these ten years, and yet he hath store enough for as many years to come. I judge this to be true, and utter it with heaviness, that neither the Britains under the Romans and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Normans, had ever such damage of their learned monuments as we have seen in our time."

It used to seem some condonation of these sad evils to say that the suppression of the monasteries was brought because of the evil lives of the monks. Protestant historians were wont to proclaim that they were plague-spots of immorality which had to be eradicated. The careful investigation of historians in our time has completely refuted any such conclusion as this. A few of the smaller monasteries were found not to be living up to their high ideals. A few, but a very few monks, were found to be unworthy of their calling. Even with all the desire that there was to discredit them, nothing could be found to say against the greater monasteries, and the governments had to employ other means in order to bring about their suppression with some shadow of legality. Creatures of the king were forced into the position of abbot and then by prearrangement surrendered the monasteries and their possessions to the crown. Every advance in critical history in modern times has tended more and more to the vindication of the monks.

An American in our own time might well be expected to hold the balance straight without disturbance from old-time prejudices. Rev. Dr. George Hedges, Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, of Cambridge, Ma.s.s., in his "Fountains Abbey: The Story of a Medieval Monastery," said (p.

88):

"The quiet judgment of the modern historian is in favor of the monks, and finds most of them to have been men of respectable and pious lives. The sober persons in white ca.s.socks, who confessed faults in the chapter meeting and cheerfully suffered chastis.e.m.e.nt for them to which the man in the street gave not a moment's thought, had a pa.s.sionate longing to be good. They were intent upon the living of a righteous life."

He says, further quoting from Burke, "An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse."

EFFECT ON ART

It is generally recognized now that the religious revolt ruined art.

Religion had supplied the motives for great art, but most of these, and especially the tender feeling of reverence for the Mother of G.o.d and of the saints and the belief in angels, disappeared at {558} this time or were sadly hampered in their expression, and the whole tendency of the reform movement was iconoclastic. Image wors.h.i.+p was one of the bitterest imputations against the old Church. It is curiously interesting to note that just in as much as art has developed in Protestant countries again, the churches have been raised from bare conventicles and meeting-houses to shrines of artistic beauty once more. It must not be forgotten, however, that this is quite contrary to the "protests" that were originally made against the old Church and that the ideas involved in this rejection of art in the Church, helped to lead many in artistic uncultured minds away from Catholicity in that time of storm and stress.

In his chapter on Parish Life in England in his well-known book, "Before the Great Pillage," Rev. Augustus Jessop, who in spite of his bitter condemnation of what happened at and after the Reformation, has never, I believe, become a Catholic, tells of the marvellous beauty of the Church structures in the ages which used to be called dark and are now known to be full of light, and then tells what happened after the so-called Reformation.

_"And we get fairly bewildered by the astonis.h.i.+ng wealth of skill and artistic taste and aesthetic feeling which there must have been in this England of ours, in times which till lately we had a.s.sumed to be barbaric times._ Bewildered, I say, because we cannot understand how it all came to a dead stop in a single generation, not knowing that the frightful spoliation of our churches and other parish buildings, and the outrageous plunder of the parish guilds in the reign of Edward the Sixth by the horrible band of robbers that carried on their detestable work, effected such a hideous obliteration, such a clean sweep of the precious treasures that were dispersed in rich profusion over the whole land, that a dull despair of ever replacing what had been ruthlessly pillaged crushed the spirit of the whole nation, and _art died out in rural England, and King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries."_ (Italics ours.)

Under art is, of course, included sculpture and architecture, as well as many of the artistic crafts. It is easy to understand that under the influence of the carping spirit of the Reformation all of these became decadent. Men gave up old-time faith for individual judgment of religious truth. The sterilizing influence of the controversial period which followed can be readily understood. Gerhard Hauptmann, the German dramatic poet, to whom the n.o.bel Prize for literature was recently awarded, characterized this decadence of art under the reformers in a very striking pa.s.sage.

"I, as a Protestant, have often had to regret that we purchased our freedom of conscience, our individual liberty, at entirely too high a price. In order to make room for a small, mean little plant of personal life we destroyed a whole garden of fancy, and hewed down a virgin forest of esthetic ideas. We went even so far {559} in the insanity of our weakness as to throw out of the garden of our souls the fruitful soil that had been acc.u.mulating for thousands of years, or else we ploughed it under sterile clay.

"We have to-day, then, an intellectual culture that is well protected by a hedge of our personality, but within this hedge we have only delicate dwarf trees and unworthy plants, the poor progeny of great predecessors. We have telegraph lines, bridges and railroads, but there grow no churches and cathedrals, only sentry boxes and barracks. We need gardeners who will cause the present sterilizing process of the soil to stop and will enrich the surface by working up into it the rich layers beneath. In my workroom there is ever before me the photograph of St. Sebald's tomb. This rich German symbol arose from the invisible in the most luxurious developmental period of German art. As a formal product of that art, it is very difficult to appreciate it as it deserves. It seems to me as one of the most wonderful bits of work in the whole field of artistic accomplishment. The soul of all the great medieval period enwraps this silver coffin, giving to it a n.o.ble unity, and enthrones on the very summit of Death, Life as a growing child. Such a work could only have come to its perfection in the protected s.p.a.ces of the old Mother Church."

All the arts of decoration suffered similarly and no art failed to be affected unfavorably. Music, which had had one great period of development in the old Plain Chant in the later Middle Ages under ecclesiastical influence, was just entering on another and glorious development under the patronage of the Church when the reform movement began. Plain song had given such masterpieces as the Lamentations, of which Rockstro said that no sadder succession of single notes had ever been put together, and the Exultet sung in the Ma.s.s on Holy Sat.u.r.day, which he declares represents a similarly high expression of joy. Now figured and harmonic music was about to have its place. Palestrina's Ma.s.ses and St. Philip Neri's Oratorios were just beginning. The reformers, however, would have nothing to do with music.

Congregational singing was adopted from the old Church, but for music as an art to uplift religion and add its tribute of devotion there was no place. Part song had originated in Church ceremonials, as dramatic literature originated in the ceremonies connected with the celebration of the various mysteries. Like every other human and natural aspiration, music was under suspicion in the new religion, and the consequence was a serious detriment to the development of the art. It was not until the gradual loosening of the bonds of the Puritanic elements in the Protestant religion that music began to come to her own again.

DECLINE OF CHARITY

In humanitarianism and the solution of social problems, the Reformation was particularly backward. The leaders in the new religions were so intent upon explaining their own doctrines and modes of thinking and gathering disciples and having other people {560} think as they did, that charitable works suffered severely. The destruction of the monasteries and convents left many needy, but there were but few to care for them. Above all, the new doctrine of justification by faith alone, which declared that good works were of no import so long as men believed in a particular way, took away the motive for much of the charitable work that had been done before. It is not surprising, then, that hospitals and the care of the ailing and the old reached a depth of degradation that is rather hard to understand. We in the twentieth century know how low hospital care and nursing had sunk in the early nineteenth century, and we have been inclined to think that it must have been much worse in the generations preceding. It is a surprise, then, to find that the first half of the nineteenth century represents what has been well called by Miss Nutting and Miss Dock, in their "History of Nursing," the Dark Period of Nursing, during which "the condition of the nursing art, the well-being of the patient and the status of the nurse all sank to an indescribable level of degradation."

Jacobson, in his Essays on "The History of Care for the Ailing,"

[Footnote 51] traces just when this decadence began, not long after the reform movement succeeded in gaining a firm foothold, and he outlines in detail just how the descent came about. He says:

[Footnote 51: Beitrage zur Geschichte des Krankencomforts, _Deutsche Krankenpflege Zeitung,_ 1898, in 4 parts.]

"It is a remarkable fact that attention to the well-being of the sick, improvements in hospitals and inst.i.tutions generally and to details of nursing care, had a period of complete and lasting stagnation after the middle of the seventeenth century, or from the close of the Thirty Years' War. Neither officials nor physicians took any interest in the elevation of nursing or in improving the condition of hospitals. During the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, he proceeds to say, nothing was done to bring either construction or nursing to a better state. Solely among the religious orders did nursing remain an interest, and some remnants of technique survive. The result was that in this period the general level of nursing fell far below that of earlier periods. The hospitals of cities were like prisons, with bare, undecorated walls and little dark rooms, small rooms where no sun could enter, and dismal wards where fifty or one hundred patients were crowded together, deprived of all comforts and even of necessaries. In the munic.i.p.al and state inst.i.tutions of this period, the beautiful gardens, roomy halls, and springs of water of the old cloister hospital of the Middle Ages were not heard of, still less the comforts of their friendly interiors."

The more careful study of the guilds, particularly, has served to show what an immense social wrong was done by this confiscation of what for the moment, strictly for government purposes, was called Church property. At the beginning of Henry VIII's reign, {561} it has been calculated by Toulmin Smith that there were some 30,000 guilds in England. These had very large sums in their treasuries. They responded to all the social needs that we are now only just waking up to once more. They provided old age and disability pensions, insurance against fire and flood, against loss by robbery, by imprisonment, and against the loss of cattle and farm products; there were forms of insurance against the loss of sight, against the loss of a limb or any other form of crippling. The amount of money confiscated from the treasuries of these guilds has been calculated at a value in our money of several hundred millions of dollars. When it is recalled that the census of England made in Elizabeth's time, just before the Great Armada was expected, showed a total population of less than five million, the amount of good that could be accomplished by this vast sum of money, not in the hands of a few, but distributed in 30,000 treasuries and used for social purposes, can be readily understood. After the reform in England, practically no more was heard of the guilds, and social wrongs began to be multiplied.

SUPERSt.i.tION AND TORTURE

It is often said that with the Reformation came the end of superst.i.tion and of that exaggerated faith in religion which keeps people from using their reason and that over-attention to the things of the other world instead of this which keeps them from being practical and prosperous. The subsequent history, however, of the countries most affected by the German religious revolt, far from bearing out this declaration, shows how much harm came from the absence of a strong central religious authority and how much of loss to idealism there was in the diminution of the childlike faith which had meant so much, not only for religion, but for literature and for art in the preceding centuries.

There was no obliteration of superst.i.tion, but superst.i.tion changed its object, and now, instead of being poetic, often became cruel and intolerant. The witchcraft delusion, for instance, which represented the worst manifestation of superst.i.tion which mankind has perhaps ever suffered from, affected the Protestant countries much more than the Catholic countries. Thousands and thousands of people were put to death as witches in Germany, and it was from the Protestant countries that the delusion spread, by psychic contagion, to the Catholic countries of Europe. Catholic countries not in intimate relations with Protestant countries, like Ireland, were not affected by it. Though Ireland has been the most Catholic of countries, not a witch has been put to death there, by any formal process of law, for over five hundred years. Here in America the witchcraft delusion is one of the sad blots on our history. Many other forms of superst.i.tion manifested themselves, and when there {562} were not religious motives there were other reasons. Men apparently cannot keep from being influenced by things they do not understand. Healers of all kinds take the place of the religious healing of the medieval period, and medical and scientific superst.i.tions replace religious supercredulity. Electric belts and pads replace relics. Over-estimated remedies and utterly inefficient cures of all kinds are believed in much more now without reason than ever medieval folk allowed themselves to be carried away by religious superst.i.tions.

A similar historical error proclaims that torture and suffering for opinions and cruel punishment went out with the Reformation, or at least wherever that movement gained a firm foothold. This is absolutely untrue, for the trials of the witches everywhere were accompanied by torture, and cruel punishments were the rule, particularly in the Protestant countries. It is rather amusing sometimes to read, in newspaper and magazine articles, descriptions of the torture of the Inquisition and the heartlessness of medieval people, ecclesiastics in the same breath with the mention of the Iron Maiden and the famous torture boots of Nuremberg. These, however, were inventions not made for the Inquisition nor for the Middle Ages, but for the post-reformation period in Protestant Nuremberg. And it must not be forgotten that Nuremberg was one of the most cultivated cities of Germany and that its people were highly educated, and that it was exactly in such a reform city that torture and cruel punishments were invented and developed. Torture was one of the modes of getting at truth for legal purposes under the Roman law. It continued almost until our own time to be a legal mode of procedure. Even at the present time it has not entirely gone out, and while the means of physical torture are removed, the "third degree" and various phases of mental torment replace them.

POLITICAL DECADENCE

Above all, the political import of this movement, so often thought to be purely religious, must not be forgotten. The n.o.bility lost at this time, to a great extent, their independence. The king became supreme, and the new nationalism which developed in Europe knit countries and peoples very close together which had only been very loosely connected before. Ferdinand was King of Aragon and Isabella Queen of Castile when their marriage brought these kingdoms together. Subsequent developments at this time made the Spanish peninsula a unit.

Practically the same thing happened in France. Pope Julius II planned a united Italy. It was scarcely half a century after the close of Columbus' Century that the Scotch and English crowns became united.

Many of the great n.o.bles of these countries lost their prestige. The foolish extravagance of {563} the Field of the Cloth of Gold is said to have cost many a n.o.bleman of France and England his estates, or at least made him absolutely independent in the favor of the king.

In the midst of this political revolution a change in the prevailing religion made a very valuable a.s.set for monarchs whose position was not over-secure or whose treasury was exhausted, for it handed over to them the care of the Church and its property as well as of the State and its revenues. This enabled them to confiscate large sums of money, to confer Church estates on n.o.ble favorites; but, above all, it left them without any strong organized ethical factor within the State to oppose any acts of injustice that they might do. Their Lord Chancellors had been bishops before, but now they were political favorites and often the veriest of time-servers. Lord Campbell's characterization of some of the English post-reformation chancellors is illuminating for this. The amount of political injustice that resulted is easy to understand, though it is not easy to comprehend how the people stood it.

The const.i.tution of the English House of Lords since the Reformation represents, by contrast, in a very striking way the difference between the old and the new in political matters. At the present time the House of Lords is almost exclusively hereditary. About one-seventh of its members are there by appointment or election, and a large part of even this moiety is chosen from the descendants of the hereditary n.o.bility. Before the Reformation sixty per cent of the House of Lords consisted of the Lords Spiritual. Many of these were Bishops, but more of them were Abbots and Priors of Religious Houses, Masters and Generals of Religious Orders and other officials representing the monasteries as large landholders, who at the same time represented considerable bodies of peasantry, tillers of the soil of monasteries, who were so happy, as was often said, to be under the cross. Not a few of the bishops were the self-made sons of the middle cla.s.s, or even the poor. A great many of the abbots and representatives of religious orders came from even the lower orders. They were men who had been chosen by their fellow-religious to rule over them because they were considered to have the best qualities of heart and soul for such positions. In the course of centuries a great many of these men were saints, that is, represented that character and disposition which made the men of the after-time declare that they had lived heroic lives of unselfishness and care for others.

It is true that at times some of the Lords Spiritual were the sons of the n.o.bility, favorites of kings, men who used political influence in order to secure Church preferment; but the proportion of these was never very large, and while many are known, it is because the history of many centuries is gone over for them. Probably no better second chamber for conservative legislation could {564} possibly be organized than this one of the House of Lords before the Reformation actually was. The majority of the men in it were representatives, not of one cla.s.s, but of all the cla.s.ses of England. There were always many peasants' sons and the sons of little tradesmen, and these men had often risen by merit and yet only under such circ.u.mstances as precluded family ambition at least, and usually their advancement was due to their known lack of personal ambition. As a rule, their unselfishness had been the princ.i.p.al trait by which they secured preferment. They had the best interests of the poor cla.s.ses particularly at heart. Without any chance for ambition for themselves, without any desires for the enrichment of a family which did not exist for them, there were as many safeguards around their fulfilment of their duty as representatives of the people as can possibly be drawn.

Even such safeguards will not prevent all abuses, but they come as near doing it as is possible. Nothing is more illuminating, as regards political conditions from a social standpoint, than this comparative study of the pre-reformation House of Lords with that of the present.

In political freedom, the times after the Reformation represent decadence mainly because of the placing in the hands of the civil government the authority in both political and religious matters. As a consequence of the elimination of the Church authorities as independent factors in the life of the people instead of subservient to government officials, there was a serious inroad upon the rights as citizens that had been obtained by hard striving during preceding centuries. Modern political developments are not so much a new a.s.sertion of modern democracy as a reversion to the democratic principles of the Middle Ages. That will seem to many people profoundly paradoxical. It is only a paradox, however, to those who do not know the political life of the Middle Ages. Magna Charta was drawn up and signed, the fundamental laws of Spain and France adopted, the Golden Bull in Hungary promulgated, and the Swiss declaration of independence issued all in a single century of the preceding time--the thirteenth. Such principles as that there shall be no taxation without representation were then formulated, and the free cities acquired rights for their citizens and laid the foundation of that government of the people, by the people and for the people which is the basis of modern democracy. All this was seriously disturbed at the time of the reform movement, and a decadence similar to that which took place in humanitarianism and the hospital and nursing movement may be traced with regard to political liberty. It culminated at the end of the eighteenth century in that awful cataclysm of the French Revolution which tried to rea.s.sert all the old principles of political freedom and correct all the abuses at once and right the c.u.mulated wrongs of centuries that was doomed to failure. The series of revolutions of the early {565} nineteenth century were needed to give people back something like the rights that they had had in the Middle Ages and to create a public sentiment once more favorable to democratic inst.i.tutions. Hilaire Belloc, who probably knows the French Revolution as well as any in our generation, declared not long since that it represented an effort to bring the world back to those ideals of democracy which had developed in the Middle Ages. Our period represents exactly the end of the Middle Ages, and it is after the Reformation that the decadence of the fine old democratic spirit which had been fostered within the bounds of the old Church may be noted.

Above all, popular happiness decreased and indeed almost disappeared throughout Europe as the result of the reform movement. Before that, the Church holy days, nearly twoscore in number in the year, provided ample opportunities for leisure and recreation, and the Church societies, by the giving of the mystery and morality plays, and the guilds by their banquets and outdoor meetings, the various "ales," as they were called, had furnished frequent occasions for hearty, healthy amus.e.m.e.nt. All this stopped with the Reformation. Puritanical conceptions of religion rubbed the holy days, that were also holidays, out of the year. We are now engaged in putting them back as anniversaries of national events and of the births of national heroes instead of the celebrations of Christian feasts and saints' days, as bank holidays and memorial days of various kinds. The sects became so much occupied with discussions of dogma that they took almost no interest in the amus.e.m.e.nts of the people. Now men met to dispute over doctrines that they could not understand, and instead of the beautiful ceremonies of the old religion, with their satisfying appeal to all the senses and their charm and teaching quality, even as mere spectacles, they listened to long-winded, dry-as-dust sermons as a matter of duty, and went home to sit gloomily in darkened rooms for the observance of what they called the Sabbath. Before the Reformation, the people, after the Church services, used to meet for games and recreation upon the green in front of the Church, and the young folks had had opportunities for their Sunday pleasures of all kinds. Only in recent years, with the breaking up of the bonds of Protestantism, have we gone back to revive medieval ways.

The nations drew away from each other, and the internationalism that had been developing and that had been fostered by community of Church interest disappeared. National governments became more consolidated, but the peoples became more and more separated in sympathy. Until commerce developed in the modern time, that fine internationalism which had so often been exhibited in spirit, at least during the Middle Ages, was at an end. The Crusades had done much to break down the barriers of narrow nationalism. {566} The religious orders had still further fostered intercourse and increased sympathy among the nations. The universities, with their various nations among the students, had been nurturing grounds for better feeling among men. All this was now practically at an end. Not only that, but sectionalism in politics and sectarianism in religion drew men farther and farther apart and made them look upon those of other nations with less and less sympathy. The political change made for the concentration of power in the hands of rulers and the strengthening of the states for war, but it took away many of the rights of men and, above all, lessened their sympathies for their kind, except among their own people, and obliterated that spirit of good fellows.h.i.+p among the educated and cultured people of the world which had been so well nurtured in the time before. It is only during the later nineteenth century that there has come to be that spirit of friendly intercourse among nations once more which existed in the later medieval and earlier Renaissance periods.