Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley Part 3

_On the pagan side_, the course of development is not so easily traced.

To determine when and where this or that custom or rite arose is now impossible; indeed, we may say, without exaggeration, that it never arose at all, because the conditions for its adoption were present throughout in human tendencies. The first Christian disciples were Jews: and the ritual which they followed was the direct outcome of ideas common to all barbaric religions, so that certain of the pagan rites and ceremonies with which they came in contact in all parts of the Empire fitted in with custom, tradition, and desire. And this applies, with stronger force, to the converts scattered from Edessa, east of the Euphrates, to the Empire's westernmost limits in Britain. Moreover, we know that a policy of adaptation and conciliation wisely governed the ruling minds of the Church, in whom, stripped of all the verbiage about them as semi-inspired successors of the apostles, there was deep-seated superst.i.tion. Paganism might, in its turn, be suppressed by Imperial edict, but it had too much in common with the later forms of Christianity not to survive in fact, however changed in name.

It may be taken as a truism that in the ceremonies of the higher religions there are no inventions, only survivals. This fact sent thinkers like Hobbes, and dealers in literary antiquities of the type of Burton, Bishop Newton, and, notablest of all, Conyers Middleton, on the search after parallels, which have received astonis.h.i.+ng confirmation in our day. Burton sees the mimicry of the "arch-deceiver in the strange sacraments, the priests, and the sacrifices," as the Romanist missionaries to Tibet saw the same diabolical parody of their rites in Buddhist temples. But Hobbes, with the sagacity which might be expected of him, recognises the continuity of ideas: "_mutato nomine tantum_; Venus and Cupid (Hobbes might have added Isis and Horus) appearing as 'the Virgin Mary and her Sonne,' and the ?p????s?? of the Heathen surviving in the Canonization of Saints. The carrying of the Popes 'by Switzers under a Canopie' is a 'Relique of the Divine Honours given to Caesar'; the carriage of Images in _Procession_ 'a Relique of the Greeks and Romans.' ... 'The Heathen had also their _Aqua l.u.s.tralis_, that is to say, _Holy Water_. The Church of Rome imitates them also in their _Holy Dayes_. They had their _Baccha.n.a.lia_, and we have our _Wakes_ answering to them; They their _Saturnalia_, and we our Carnevalls and Shrove-tuesdays liberty of Servants; They their Procession of Priapus, we our fetching-in, erection, and dancing about _May-Poles_; and Dancing is one kind of wors.h.i.+p; They had their Procession called _Ambarvalia_, and we our Procession about the Fields in the _Rogation week_.'"

Middleton examined the matter on the spot, and in his celebrated Letter from Rome gives numerous examples of "an exact CONFORMITY between POPERY and PAGANISM." Since few read his book now-a-days, some of these may be cited, because their presence goes far to explain why the conglomerate religion which Christianity had become was proof against ideas spurned alike by pagans and ecclesiastics. Visiting the place for cla.s.sical study, and "not to notice the fopperies and ridiculous ceremonies of the present Religion," Middleton soon found himself "still in old Heathen Rome," with its rituals of primitive Paganism, as if handed down by an uninterrupted succession from the priests of old to the priests of new Rome. The "smoak of the incense" in the churches transports him to the temple of the Paphian Venus described by Virgil (aeneid, I, 420); the surpliced boy waiting on the priest with the thurible reminds him of sculptures on ancient bas-reliefs representing heathen sacrifice, with a white-clad attendant on a priest holding a little chest or box in his hand. The use of holy water suggests numerous parallels. At the entrance to Pagan temples stood vases of holy liquid, a mixture of salt and common water; and, on bas-reliefs, the aspergillum or brush for the ceremony of sprinkling is carved. In the annual festival of the benediction of horses, when the animals were sent to the convent of St.

Anthony to be sprinkled (Middleton had his own horses thus blest "for about eighteenpence of our money") there is the survival of a ceremony in the Circensian games. In the lamps and wax candles before the shrines of the Madonna and Saints he is reminded of a pa.s.sage in Herodotus as to the use of lights in the Egyptian temples, while we know that lamps to the Madonna took the place of those before the images of the Lares, whose chapels stood at the corners of the streets. The Synod of Elviri (305 A. D.) forbade the lighting of wax candles during the day in cemeteries lest the spirits of the saints should be disquieted, but the custom was too deeply rooted to be abolished. As for votive offerings, Middleton truly says that "no one _custom of antiquity_ is so frequently mentioned by all their writers" ... "but the most common of all _offerings_ were _pictures_ representing the history of the miraculous cure or deliverance vouchsafed upon the vow of the donor." Of which offerings, the _blessed Virgin_ is so sure always to carry off the greatest share, that it may be truly said of her what _Juvenal_ says of the _G.o.ddess Isis_, whose religion was at that time in the greatest vogue in _Rome_, that the "_painters got their livelihood out of her_."

Middleton tells the story from Cicero which, not without covert sympathy, Montaigne quotes in his Essay on Prognostications. Diagoras, surnamed the Atheist, being found one day in a temple, was thus addressed by a friend: "You, who think the G.o.ds take no care of human affairs, do not you see here by this number of pictures how many people, for the sake of their vows, have been saved in storms at sea, and got safe into harbour?" "Yes," answered Diagoras, "I see how it is; for those are never painted who happen to be drowned." There is nothing new under the sun. Horace (Odes, Bk. I, v) tells of the s.h.i.+pwrecked sailor who hung up his clothes as a thank-offering in the temple of the sea-G.o.d who had preserved him; Polydorus Vergilius, who lived in the early part of the sixteenth century, that is, some 1,500 years after Horace, describes the cla.s.sic custom of _ex voto_ offerings at length, while Pennant the antiquary, describing the well of Saint Winifred in Flints.h.i.+re in the last century, tells of the votive offerings, in the shape of crutches and other objects, which were hung about it. To this day the store is receiving additions. The sick crowd thither as of old they crowded into the temples of aesculapius and Serapis; mothers bring their sick children as in Imperial Rome they took them to the Temple of Romulus and Remus. A draught of water from the basin near the bath, or a plunge in the bath itself, is followed by prayers at the altar of the chapel which incloses the well. When the saint's feast-day is held, the afflicted gather to kiss the reliquary that holds her bones. Perhaps one of the most pathetic sights in Catholic churches, especially in out-of-the-way villages, is the altars on which are hung votive offerings, rude daubs depicting the disease or danger from which the wors.h.i.+pper has been delivered.

As to the images, tricked out in curious robes and gewgaws, Middleton "could not help recollecting the picture which old Homer draws of _Q.

Hecuba of Troy_, prostrating herself before the _miraculous Image of Pallas_," while his wonder at the Loretto image of the "Queen of Heaven"

with "a face as black as a Negus" reminds him of the reference in Baruch to the idols black with the "perpetual smoak of lamps and incense." In his Hibbert Lectures Professor Rhys refers to churches dedicated to Notre Dame in virtue of legends of discovery of images of the Virgin on the spot. These were usually of wood, which had turned black in the soil. Such a black "Madonna" was found near Gren.o.ble, in the commune of La Zouche. Then, in the t.i.tles of the new deities, Middleton correctly sees those of the old. The Queen of Heaven reminds him of Astarte or Mylitta; the Divine Mother of the Magna Mater, the "great mother" of Oriental cults. In other attributes of Mary, lineal descendant of Isis, there survive those of Venus, Lucina, Cybele, or Maria. He gives amusing examples of myths and misreadings through which certain "saints" have a place in the Roman Calendar. He apparently knew nothing of the strange confusion by which Buddha appears therein under the t.i.tle of Saint Josaphat; but he tells how, by misinterpretation of a boundary stone, Proefectus Viarum, an overseer of highways, became S. Viar; how S.

Veronica secured canonization through a blunder over the words Vera Icon: still more droll, how hagiology includes both a mountain and a mantle!

The marks of hands or feet on rocks, said to be made by the apparition of some saint or angel, call to mind "the impression of Hercules' feet on a stone in Scythia"; the picture of the Virgin, which came from heaven, suggests the descent of Numa's s.h.i.+eld "from the clouds"; that of the weeping Madonna the statue of Apollo, which Livy says wept for three successive days and nights; while the periodical miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius is obviously paralleled in the incidents named by Horace on his journey to Brundusium, when the priests of the temple at Gnatia sought to persuade him that "the frankincense used to dissolve and melt miraculously without the help of fire" (Sat., v, 97-100).

Middleton, and those of his school, thought that they were near primary formations when they struck on these suggestive cla.s.sic or pagan parallels to Christian belief and custom. But in truth they had probed a comparatively recent layer; since, far beneath, lay the unsuspected prehistoric deposits of barbaric ideas which are coincident with, and composed of, man's earliest speculations about himself and his surroundings. When, however, we borrow an ill.u.s.tration from geology, it must be remembered that our divisions, like those into which the strata of the globe are separated, are artificial. There is no real detachment.

The difference between former and present methods of research is that nowadays we have gone further down for discovery of the common materials of which barbaric, pagan, and civilized ideas are compounded.

They arise in the comparison which exists in the savage mind between the living and the non-living, and in the attribution of like qualities to things superficially resembling one another; hence belief in their efficacy, which takes active form in what may be generally termed magic.

For example, the rite of baptism is explained when we connect it with barbaric l.u.s.trations and water-wors.h.i.+p generally; as also that of the Eucharist by reference to sacrificial feasts in honour of the G.o.ds; feasts at which they were held to be both the eaters and the eaten.

Middleton, himself a clergyman, shows perplexity when watching the elevation of the host at ma.s.s. He lacked that knowledge of the origin of sacramental rites which study of barbaric customs has since supplied.

In Mr. Frazer's Golden Bough, the "central idea" of which is "the conception of the slain G.o.d," he shows at what an early stage in his speculations man formulated the conception of deity incarnated in himself, or in plant or animal, and as afterward slain, both the incarnation and the death being for the benefit of mankind. The G.o.d is his own sacrifice, and in perhaps the most striking form, as insisted upon by Mr. Frazer, he is, as corn-spirit, killed in the person of his representative; the pa.s.sage in this mode of incarnation to the custom of eating bread sacramentally being obvious. The fundamental idea of this sacramental act, as the ma.s.s of examples collected by Mr. Frazer further goes to show, is that by eating a thing its physical and mental qualities are acquired. So the barbaric mind reasons, and extends the notion to all beings. To quote Mr. Frazer: "By eating the body of the G.o.d he shares in the G.o.d's attributes and powers. And when the G.o.d is a corn-G.o.d, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-G.o.d, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the wors.h.i.+pper partakes of the real body and blood of his G.o.d. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-G.o.d like Dionysus is not an act of revelry; it is a solemn sacrament." It is, perhaps, needless to point out that the same explanation applies to the rites attaching to Demeter, or to add what further parallels are suggested in the belief that Dionysus was slain, rose again, and descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. This, however, by the way. What has to be emphasized is, that in the quotation just given we have transubstantiation clearly antic.i.p.ated as the barbaric idea of eating the G.o.d. In proof of the underlying continuity of that idea two witnesses--Catholic and Protestant--may be cited.

The Church of Rome, and in this the Greek Church is at one therewith, thus defines the term transubstantiation in the Canon of the Council of Trent:

"If any one shall say that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there remains the substance of bread and wine together with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the species of bread and wine alone remaining--which conversion the Catholic Church most fittingly calls Transubstantiation--let him be anathema."

The Church of England, through the medium of a letter to a well-known newspaper, the British Weekly (29th August, 1895), supplies the following ill.u.s.tration of the position of its "High" section, and this, it is interesting to note, from the church of which Mr. Gladstone's son is rector, and in which the distinguished statesman himself often reads the lessons:

"A few Sundays ago--8 o'clock celebration of Holy Communion. Rector, officiating minister (Hawarden Church).

"When the point was reached for the communicants to partake, cards containing a hymn to be sung after Communion were distributed among the congregation. This hymn opened with the following couplet:--

Jesu, mighty Saviour, Thou art _in_ us now.

And my attention was arrested by an asterisk referring to a footnote. The word 'in,' in the second line, was printed in italics, and the note intimated that those who had _not_ communicated should sing '_with_' instead of '_in_,' i. e. those who had taken the consecrated elements to sing 'Thou art _in_ us now,' and those who had not, to sing 'Thou art _with_ us now.'"

Whether, therefore, the cult be barbaric or civilized, we find theory and practice identical. The G.o.d is eaten so that the communicant thereby becomes a "partaker of the divine nature."

In the gestures denoting _sacerdotal benediction_ we have probably an old form of averting the evil eye; in the act of _breathing_ on a bishop at the service of consecration there was the survival of belief in transference of spiritual qualities, the soul being, as language evidences, well-nigh universally identified with breath. The modern spiritualist who describes apparitions as having the "consistency of cigar-smoke," is one with the Congo negroes who leave the house of the dead unswept for a time lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost. The inhaling of the last breath of the dying Roman by his nearest kinsman has parallel in the breathing of the risen Jesus on his disciples that they might receive the Holy Ghost (John xx, 22). In the offering of _prayers for the dead_; in the _canonization_ and _intercession_ of _saints_; in the _prayers_ and _offerings_ at the _shrines of the Virgin_ and _saints_, and at the _graves of martyrs_; there are the manifold forms of that great cult of the departed which is found throughout the world. To this may be linked the _belief in angels_, whether good or bad, or guardian, because the element common to the whole is animistic, the peopling of the heavens above, as well as the earth beneath, with an innumerable company of spiritual beings influencing the destinies of men. Well might Jews and Moslems reproach the Christians, as they did down to the eighth century, with having filled the world with more G.o.ds than they had overthrown in the pagan temples; while we have Erasmus, in his Encomium Moriae, when reciting the names and functions of saints, adding that "as many things as we wish, so many G.o.ds have we made." Closely related to this group of beliefs is the _adoration of relics_, the vitality of which has springs too deep in human nature to be wholly abolished, whether we carry about us a lock from the hair of some dead loved one, or read of the fragments of saints or martyrs which lie beneath every Catholic altar, or of the skull-bones of his ancestor which the savage carries about with him as a charm. Then there is the long list of _church festivals_, the reference of which to pagan prototypes is but one step toward their ultimate explanation in nature-wors.h.i.+p; there are the _processions_ which are the successors of Corybantic frenzies, and, more remotely, of savage dances and other forms of excitation; there is that now somewhat casual belief in the _Second Advent_ which is a member of the widespread group wherein human hopes fix eyes on the return of long-sleeping heroes; of Arthur and Olger Dansk, of Vainamoinen and Quetzalcoatl, of Charlemagne and Barbarossa, of the lost Marko of Servia and the lost King Sebastian. We speak of it as "casual," because among the two hundred and eighty-odd sects scheduled in Whitaker's Almanack the curious in such inquiries will note only three distinctive bodies of Adventists.

All changes in popular belief have been, and, practically, remain superficial; the old animism pervades the higher creeds. In our own island, for example, the Celtic and pre-Celtic paganism remained unleavened by the old Roman religion. The legions took back to Rome the G.o.ds which they brought with them. The names of Mithra and Serapis occur on numerous tablets, the wors.h.i.+p of the one--that "Sol invictus" whose birthday at the winter solstice became (see p. 42) the anniversary of the birth of Christ--had ranged as far west as South Wales and Northumberland; while the foundations of a temple to the other have been unearthed at York. The chief Celtic G.o.ds, in virtue of common attributes as elemental nature-deities, were identified with certain _dii majores_ of the Roman pantheon, and the _deae matres_ equated with the gracious or malevolent spirits of the indigenous faith. But the old names were not displaced. Neither did the earlier Christian missionaries effect any organic change in popular beliefs, while, during the submergence of Christianity under waves of barbaric invasion, there were infused into the old religion kindred elements from oversea which gave it yet more vigorous life. The eagle penetration of Gibbon detected this persistent element at work when he described the sequel to the futile efforts of Theodosius to extirpate paganism. The ancestor wors.h.i.+p which lay at the core of much of it took shape among the Christianized pagans in the wors.h.i.+p of martyrs and in the scramble after their relics. The bodies of prophets and apostles were discovered by the strangest coincidences, and transported to the churches by the Tiber and the Bosphorus, and although the supply of these more important remains was soon exhausted, there was no limit to the production of relics of their person or belongings, as of filings from the chains of S. Peter, and from the gridiron of S.

Lawrence. The catacombs yielded any number of the bodies of martyrs, and Rome became a huge manufactory to meet the demands for wonder-working relics from every part of Christendom. A sceptical feeling might be aroused at the claims of a dozen abbeys to possession of the veritable crown of thorns wherewith the majesty of the suffering Christ was mocked, but it was silenced before the numerous fragments of his cross, since ingenuity has computed that this must have contained at least one hundred and eighty million cubic millemetres, whereas the total cubic volume of all the known relics is but five millions. "It must," remarks Gibbon (Decline and Fall, end of chap. xxviii), "ingeniously be confessed that the ministers of the Catholic Church imitated the profane model which they were impotent to destroy. The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the superst.i.tions of paganism if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman Empire, but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals."

Enough has been said on a topic to which prominence has been given because it brings into fuller relief the fact that in a religion for which its apologists claim divine origin and guidance "to the end of the world" we have the same intrusion of the rites and customs of lower cults which marks other advanced faiths. Hence, science and superst.i.tion being deadly foes, the explanation of that hostile att.i.tude toward inquiry and that dread of its results which marked Christianity down to modern times. While the intrusion of corrupting elements presents difficulties which the theory of the supernatural history of Christianity alone creates, it accords with all that might be predicted of a religion whose success was due to its early escape from the narrow confines of Judaism; and to its fortunate contact with the enterprising peoples to whom the civilization of Europe and the New World is due.

2. _From Augustine to Lord Bacon._

A. D. 400-A. D. 1600.

The foregoing slight outline of the causes which operated for centuries against the freedom of the human mind will render it needless to follow the history of the development of Christian polity and dogma--the temporalizing of the one, and the crystallizing of the other. Yet one prominent actor in that history demands a brief notice, because of the influence which his teaching wielded from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. The annals of the churches in Africa, along whose northern sh.o.r.es Christianity had spread early and rapidly, yield notable names, but none so distinguished as that of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 395 to 430 A. D. This greatest of the Fathers of the Church sought, as has been remarked already, to bring the system of Aristotle, the greatest of ancient naturalists, into line with Christian theology. His range of study was well-nigh as wide as that of the famous Stagirite, but we are here concerned only with so much of it as bears on an attempt to graft the development theory on the dogma of special creation. Augustine, accepting the Old Testament cosmogony as a revelation, believed that the world was created out of nothing, but, this initial paradox accepted, he argued that G.o.d had endowed matter with certain powers of self-development which left free the operation of natural causes in the production of plants and animals. With this, however, as already noted, he held, with preceding philosophers and with his fellow-theologians, the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It explained to him the existence of apparently purposeless creatures, as flies, frogs, mice, etc. "Certain very small animals," he says, "may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter." Not till the seventeenth century did the experiments of Redi refute a doctrine which had held part of the biological field for above two thousand years, and which still has adherents. Of course Augustine, as do modern Catholic biologists, excepted man from the operation of secondary causes, and held that his soul was created by the direct intervention of the Creator. Augustine's concessions are, therefore, more seeming than real, and, moreover, we find him denying the existence of the antipodes on the ground that Scripture is silent about them, and also, that if G.o.d had placed any races there, they could not see Christ descending at his second coming. To Augustine the air was full of devils who are the cause of "all diseases of Christians." In other words, he was not ahead of the illusions of his age. Then, too, he shows that allegorizing spirit which was manifest in Greece a thousand years earlier; the spirit which reads hidden meanings in Homer, in Horace, and in Omar Khayyam; and which, in the hands of present-day Gnostics, mostly fantastic or illiterate cabalists, converts the plain narratives of Old and New Testaments into vehicles of mysterious types and esoteric symbols. It is in such allegorical vein that Augustine explains the outside and inside pitching of the ark as typifying the safety of the Church from the leaking-in of heresy; while the ghastly application of symbolical exegetics is seen in his citation of the words of Jesus, "Compel them to come in," as a Divine warrant for the slaughter of heretics.

We shall meet with no other such commanding figure in Church history till nine hundred years have pa.s.sed, when Thomas Aquinas, the "Angel of the Schools," appears, but although that period marks no advance of the Church from her central position, it witnessed changes in her fortune through the intrusion of a strange people into her territory and sanctuaries.

Perhaps there are few events in history more impressive than the conversion of the wild and ignorant Arab tribes of the seventh century from stone-wors.h.i.+p to monotheism. The series of conquests which followed had also, as an indirect and unforeseen result, effects of vast importance in the revival and spread of Greek culture from the Tigris to the Guadalquivir. It is not easy, neither does the inquiry fall within our present purpose, to discover the special impulses which led Mohammed, the leader of the movement, to preach a new faith whose one creed, stripped of all subtleties, was the unity of G.o.d. Large numbers of Jews and Christians had settled in Arabia long before his time, and he had become acquainted with the narrowness of the one, and with the causes of the wranglings of the other, riven, as these last-named were, into sects quarrelling over the nature of the Person of Christ. These, and the fetichism of his fellow-countrymen, may, perhaps, have impelled him to start a crusade the mandate for which he, in fanatic impulse, believed came from heaven. The result is well known. The hitherto untamed nomads became the eager instruments of the prophet. Under his leaders.h.i.+p, and that of the able Khalifs who succeeded him, the flag of Islam was carried from East to West, till within one hundred years of the flight of Mohammed from Mecca (622 A. D.) it waved from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. With the conquest of Syria there was achieved one of the greatest and most momentous of triumphs in the capture of Jerusalem, and the seizure of sites sanctified to Christians by a.s.sociation with the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

Only a few years before (614 A. D.), the holy city had been taken by Chosroes; the sacred buildings raised over the venerated tomb had been burned, and the cross--a spurious relic--carried off by the Persian king. These places have been, as it were, the c.o.c.kpit of Christendom from the time of the siege of Jerusalem under t.i.tus to that of the Crimean war, when blood was spilt like water in a conflict stirred by squabbles between Latin and Greek Christians over possession of the key of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre these sectaries are still kept from flying at one another's throats by the muskets of Mohammedan soldiers.

The Arabian conquest of Persia followed that of Syria. The turn of Egypt soon came, the city of Alexandria being taken in 640, seven years after the prophets' death. Since the loss of Greek freedom, and the decay of intellectual life at Athens, that renowned place had become, notably under the Ptolemies, the chief home of science and philosophy. Through the propagandism of Christianity among the h.e.l.lenized Jews, of whom, as of Greeks, large numbers had settled there, it was also the birthplace of dogmatic theology, and, therefore, the fountain whence welled the controversies whose logomachies were the gossip of the streets of Constantinople and the cause of b.l.o.o.d.y persecution. After a few years'

pause, the Saracens (Ar., _sharkiin_, orientals) resumed their conquering march. They captured and burnt Carthage, another famous centre of Christianity, and then crossed over to Spain. In "the fair and fertile isle of Andalusia" the Gothic king Roderick was aroused from his luxurious life in Toledo to lead his army in gallant, but vain, attempt to repel the infidel invaders. So rapid was their advance that in six years they had subdued the whole of Spain, the north and northwestern portions excepted, for the hardy Basque mountaineers maintained their independence against the Arabs, as they had maintained it against Celt, Roman, and Goth. Only before the walls of Tours did the invaders meet with a rebuff from Charles Martel and his Franks, which arrested their advance in Western Europe; as, in a more momentous defeat before Constantinople by Leo III. in 718, fourteen years earlier, the torrent of Mohammedan conquest was first checked.

Enough, however, of Saracenic wars and their destructive work, which, if tradition lies not, included the burning of the remnants of the vast Alexandrian library. "A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may contradict it," and Islam has ever been a worse foe to science than Christianity. Its a.s.sociation, as a religion, with the renaissance of knowledge, was as wholly accidental as the story of it is interesting.

Under the Sa.s.sanian kings, Persia had become an active centre of intellectual life, reaching the climax of its Augustan age in the reign of Chosroes. Jew, Greek, and Christian alike had welcome at his court, and translations of the writings of the Indian sages completed the eclecticism of that enlightened monarch. Then came the ruthless Arab, and philosophy and science were eclipsed. But with the advent of the Abbaside Khalifs, who number the famous Haroun al-Raschid among them, there came revival of the widest toleration, and consequent return of intellectual activity. Baghdad arose as the seat of empire. Situated on the high road of Oriental commerce, along which travelled foreign ideas and foreign culture, that city became also the Oxford of her time.

Arabic was the language of the conquerors, and into that poetic, but unphilosophic, tongue, Greek philosophy and science were rendered. Under the rule of those Khalifs, says Renan, "nontolerant, nonreluctant persecutors," free thought developed; the _Motecallenim_ or "disputants"

held debates, where all religions were examined in the light of reason.

Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, and Ptolemy were text-books in the colleges, the repute of whose teachers brought to Baghdad and Naishapur (dear to lovers of "old" Khayyam) students westward from Spain, and eastward from Transoxiana.

"Arab" philosophy, therefore, is only a name. It has been well described as "a system of Greek thought expressed in a Semitic tongue; and modified by Oriental influences called into existence by the patronage of the more liberal princes, and kept alive by the zeal of a small band of thinkers." In the main, it began and ended with the study of Aristotle, commentaries on whom became the chief work of scholars, at whose head stands the great name of Averroes. Through these--a handful of Jews and Moslems--knowledge of Greek science, of astronomy, algebra, chemistry, and medicine, was carried into Western Europe. By the latter half of the tenth century, one hundred and fifty years after the translation of Aristotle into Arabic, Spain had become no mean rival of Baghdad and Cairo. Schools were founded; colleges to which the Girton girls of the period could repair to learn mathematics and history were set up by lady princ.i.p.als; manufactures and agriculture were encouraged; and lovely and stately palaces and mosques beautified Seville, Cordova, Toledo, and Granada, which last-named city the far-famed Alhamra or Red Fortress still overlooks. Seven hundred years before there was a public lamp in London, and when Paris was a town of swampy roadways bordered by windowless dwellings, Cordova had miles of well-lighted, well-paved streets; and the constant use of the bath by the "infidel" contrasted with the saintly filth and rags which were the pride of flesh-mortifying devotees and the outward and odorous signs of their religion. The pages of our dictionaries evidence in familiar mathematical and chemical terms; in the names of the princ.i.p.al "fixed" stars; and in the words "admiral" and "chemise"; the influence of the "Arab" in science, war, and dress.

It forms no part of our story to tell how feuds between rival dynasties and rival sects of Islam, becoming more acute as time went on, enabled Christianity to recover lost ground, and, in the capture of Granada in 1492, to put an end to Moorish rule in Spain. Before that event, a knowledge of Greek philosophy had been diffused through Christendom by the translation of the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and other scholars, into Latin. That was about the middle of the twelfth century, when Aristotle, who had been translated into Arabic some three centuries earlier, also appeared in Latin dress. The detachment of any branch of knowledge from theology being a thing undreamed of, the deep reverence in which the Stagirite was held by his Arabian commentators ultimately led to his becoming "suspect" by the Christians, since that which approved itself to the followers of Mohammed must, _ipso facto_, be condemned by the followers of Jesus. Hence came reaction, and recourse to the Scriptures as sole guide to secular as well as sacred knowledge; recourse to a method which, as Hallam says, "had not untied a single knot, or added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy."

So far as the scanty records tell (for we may never know how much was suppressed, or fell into oblivion, under ecclesiastical frowns and threats; nor how many thinkers toiled in secret and in dread), none seemed possessed either of courage or desire to supplement the revealed word by examination into things themselves. To supplant it was not dreamed of. But, in the middle of the thirteenth century, one notable exception occurred in the person of Roger Bacon, sometimes called Friar Bacon in virtue of his belonging to the order of Franciscans. He was born in 1214 at Ilchester, in Somerset, whence he afterward removed to Oxford, and thence to Paris. That this remarkable and many-sided man, cla.s.sic and Arabic scholar, mathematician, and natural philosopher, has not a more recognised place in the annals of science is strange, although it is, perhaps, partly explained by the fact that his writings were not reissued for more than three centuries after his death. He has been credited with a number of inventions, his t.i.tle to which is however doubtful, although the doubt in nowise impairs the greatness of his name. He shared the current belief in alchemy, but made a number of experiments in chemistry pointing to his knowledge of the properties of the various gases, and of the components of gunpowder. If he did not invent spectacles, or the microscope and telescope, he was skilled in optics, and knew the principles on which those instruments are made, as the following extract from his Opus Majus shows: "We can place transparent bodies in such a form and position between our eyes and other objects that the rays shall be refracted and bent toward any place we please, so that we shall see the object near at hand, or at a distance, under any angle we please; and thus from an incredible distance we may read the smallest letters, and may number the smallest particles of sand, by reason of the greatness of the angle under which they appear." He knew the "wisdom of the ancients" in the cataloguing of the stars, and suggested a reform of the calendar--following the then unknown poet-astronomer of Naishapur. But he believed in astrology, that b.a.s.t.a.r.d science which from remotest times had ruled the life of man, and which has no small number of votaries among ourselves to this day. Roger Bacon's abiding t.i.tle to fame rests, however, on his insistence on the necessity of experiment, and his enforcement of this precept by practice. As a mathematician he laid stress on the application of this "first of all the sciences"; indeed, as "preceding all others, and as disposing us to them." His experiments, both from their nature and the seclusion in which they were made, laid him open to the charge of black magic, in other words, of being in league with the devil. This, in the hands of a theology thus "possessed," became an instrument of awful torture to mankind. Roger Bacon's denial of magic only aggravated his crime, since in ecclesiastical ears, this was tantamount to a denial of the activity, nay more, of the very existence of Satan. So, despite certain encouragement in his scientific work from an old friend who afterward became Pope Clement IV., for whose information he wrote his Opus Majus, he was, on the death of that potentate, thrown into prison, whence tradition says he emerged, after ten years, only to die.

The theories of mediaeval schoolmen--a monotonous record of unprogressive ideas--need not be scheduled here, the more so as we approach the period of discoveries momentous in their ultimate effect upon opinions which now possess only the value attaching to the history of discredited conceptions of the universe. Commerce, more than scientific curiosity, gave the impetus to the discovery that the earth is a globe. Trade with the East was divided between Genoa and Venice. These cities were rivals, and the Genoese, alarmed at the growing success of the Venetians, resolved to try to reach India from the west. Their schemes were justified by reports of land indications brought by seamen who had pa.s.sed through the "Pillars of Hercules" to the Atlantic. The sequel is well known. Columbus, after clerical opposition, and rebuffs from other states, "offering," as Mr. Payne says, in his excellent History of America, "though he knew it not, the New World in exchange for three s.h.i.+ps and provisions for twelve months," finally secured the support of the Spanish king, and sailed from Cadiz on the 3d of August, 1492. On 11th of October he sighted the fringes of the New World, and believing that he had sailed from Spain to India, gave the name West Indies to the island-group. America itself had been discovered by roving Nors.e.m.e.n five hundred years before, but the fact was buried in Icelandic tradition.

Following Columbus, Vasco de Gama, a Portuguese, set sail in 1497, and taking a southerly course, doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-two years later, Ferdinand Magellan started on a voyage more famous than that of Columbus, since his ambition was to sail round the world, and thus complete the chain of proof against the theory of its flatness. For "though the Church hath evermore from Holy Writ affirmed that the earth should be a widespread plain bordered by the waters, yet he comforted himself when he considered that in the eclipses of the moon the shadow cast of the earth is round; and as is the shadow, such, in like manner, is the substance." Doubling Cape Horn through the straits that bear his name, Magellan entered the vast ocean whose calm surface caused him to call it the Pacific, and after terrible sufferings, he reached the Ladrone Islands where, either at the hands of a mutinous crew, or of savages, he was killed. His chief lieutenant, Sebastian d'Eleano, continued the voyage, and after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, brought the San Vittoria--name of happy omen--to anchor at St. Lucar, near Seville, on 7th of September, 1522. Brought, too, the story of a circ.u.mnavigated globe, and of new groups of stars never seen under northern skies.

The scene s.h.i.+fts, for the time being, from the earth to the heavens. The Church had barely recovered from the blow struck at her authority on matters of secular knowledge, when another dealt, and that by an ecclesiastic, Copernicus, Canon of Frauenburg, in Prussia. But before pursuing this, some reference to the revolt against the Church of Rome, which is the great event of the sixteenth century, is necessary, if only to inquire whether the movement known as the Reformation justified its name as freeing the intellect from theological thraldom. Far-reaching as were the areas which it covered and the effects which it wrought, its quarrel with the Church of Rome was not because of that Church's att.i.tude toward freedom of thought. On the Continent it was a protest of n.o.bler minds against the corruptions fostered by the Papacy; in England, it was personal and political in origin, securing popular support by its anti-sacerdotal character, and its appeal to national irritation against foreign control. But, both here and abroad, it sought mending rather than ending; "not to vary in any jot from the faith Catholic." It disputed the claim of the Church to be the sole interpreter of Scripture, and contended that such interpretation was the right and duty of the individual. But it would not admit the right of the individual to call in question the authority of the Bible itself: to that book alone must a man go for knowledge of things temporal as of things spiritual.

So that the Reformation was but an exchange of fetters, or, as Huxley happily puts it, the sc.r.a.ping of a little rust off the chains which still bound the mind. "Learning perished where Luther reigned," said Erasmus, and in proof of it we find the Reformer agreeing with his coadjutor, Melanchthon, in permitting no tampering with the written Word. Copernicus notwithstanding, they had no doubt that the earth was fixed and that sun and stars travelled round it, because the Bible said so. Peter Martyr, one of the early Lutheran converts, in his Commentary on Genesis, declared that wrong opinions about the creation as narrated in that book would render valueless all the promises of Christ. Wherein he spoke truly. As for the schoolmen, Luther called them "locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice." Reason he denounced as the "arch wh.o.r.e"

and the "devil's bride," Aristotle is a "prince of darkness, horrid impostor, public and professed liar, beast, and twice execrable."

Consistently enough, Luther believed vehemently in a personal devil, and in witches; "I would myself burn them," he says, "even as it is written in the Bible that the priests stoned offenders." To him demoniacal possession was a fact clear as noonday: idiocy, lunacy, epilepsy and all other mental and nervous disorders were due to it. Hence, a movement whose intent appeared to be the freeing of the human spirit riveted more tightly the bolts that imprisoned it; arresting the physical explanation of mental diseases and that curative treatment of them which is one of the countless services of science to suffering mankind. To Luther, the descent of Christ into h.e.l.l, which modern research has shown to be a variant of an Orphic legend of the underworld, was a real event, Jesus going thither that he might conquer Satan in a hand-to-hand struggle.

Therefore, freedom of thought, as we define it, had the bitterest foe in Luther, although, in his condemnation of "works," and his fanatical dogma of man's "justification by faith alone," which made him reject the Epistle of James as one "of straw," and as unworthy of a place in the Canon, he unwittingly drove in the thin end of the rationalist wedge.

The Reformers had hedged the canonical books with theories of verbal inspiration which extended even to the punctuation of the sentences.

They thus rendered intelligent study of the Bible impossible, and did grievous injury to a collection of writings of vast historical value, and of abiding interest as records of man's primitive speculations and spiritual development. But Luther's application of the right of private judgment to the omission or addition of this or that book into a canon which had been closed by a Council of the Church, surrendered the whole position, since there was no telling where the thing might stop.

Copernicus waited full thirty years before he ventured to make his theory public. The Ptolemaic system, which a.s.sumed a fixed earth with sun, moon, and stars revolving above it, had held the field for about fourteen hundred years. It accorded with Scripture; it was adopted by the Church; and, moreover, it was confirmed by the senses, the correction of which still remains, and will long remain, a condition of intellectual advance. Little wonder is it, then, that Copernicus hesitated to broach a theory thus supported, or that, when published, it was put forth in tentative form as a possible explanation more in accord with the phenomena. A preface, presumably by a friendly hand, commended the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies to Pope Paul III. It urged that "as in previous times others had been allowed the privilege of feigning what circles they chose in order to explain the phenomena," Copernicus "had conceived that he might take the liberty of trying whether, on the supposition of the earth's motion, it was possible to find better explanations than the ancient ones of the revolutions of the celestial orbs." A copy of the book was placed in the hands of its author only a few hours before his death on 23d of May, 1543.

This "upstart astrologer," this "fool who wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy," for "sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth"--these are Luther's words--was, therefore, beyond the grip of the Holy Inquisition. But a subst.i.tute was forthcoming. Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, had added to certain heterodox beliefs the heresy of Copernicanism, which he publicly taught from Oxford to Venice. For these c.u.mulative crimes he was imprisoned and, after two years, condemned to be put to death "as mercifully as possible and without the shedding of his blood," a Catholic euphemism for burning a man alive. The murder was committed in Rome on 17th of February, 1600.

The year 1543 marks an epoch in biology as in astronomy. As shown in the researches of Galen, an Alexandrian physician of the second century, there had been no difficulty in studying the structure of the lower animals, but, fortified both by tradition and by prejudice, the Church refused to permit dissection of the human body, and in the latter part of the thirteenth century, Boniface VIII. issued a Bull of the major excommunication against offenders. Prohibition, as usual, led to evasion, and Vesalius, Professor of Anatomy in Padua University, resorted to various devices to procure "subjects," the bodies of criminals being easiest to obtain. The end justified the means, as he was able to correct certain errors of Galen, and to give the _quietus_ to the old legend, based upon the myth of the creation of Eve, that man has one rib less than woman. This was among the discoveries announced in his De Corporis Humani Fabrica, published when he was only twenty-eight years of age. The book fell under the ban of the Church because Vesalius gave no support to the belief in an indestructible bone, nucleus of the resurrection body, in man. The belief had, no doubt, near relation to that of the Jews in the _os sacru_, and may remind us of Descartes'

fanciful location of the soul in the minute cone-like part of the brain known as the _conarium_, or pineal gland. On some baseless charge of attempting the dissection of a living subject, the Inquisition haled Vesalius to prison, and would have put him to death "as mercifully as possible," but for the intervention of King Charles V. of Spain, to whom Vesalius had been physician. Returning in October, 1564, from a pilgrimage taken, presumably, as atonement for his alleged offence, he was s.h.i.+pwrecked on the coast of Zante, and died of exhaustion.

While the heretical character and tendencies of discoveries in astronomy and anatomy awoke active opposition from the Church, the work of men of the type of Gesner, the eminent Swiss naturalist, and of Caesalpino, professor of botany at Padua, pa.s.sed unquestioned. No dogma was endangered by the cla.s.sification of plants and animals. But when a couple of generations after the death of Copernicus had pa.s.sed, the Inquisition found a second victim in the famous Galileo, who was born at Pisa in 1564. After spending some years in mechanical and mathematical pursuits, he began a series of observations in confirmation of the Copernican theory, of the truth of which he had been convinced in early life. With the aid of a rude telescope, made by his own hands, he discovered the satellites of Jupiter; the moon-like phases of Venus and Mars; mountains and valleys in the moon; spots on the sun's disk; and the countless stars which composed the luminous band known as the Milky Way. Nought occurred to disturb his observations till, in a work on the Solar Spots, he explained the movements of the earth and of the heavenly bodies according to Copernicus. On the appearance of that book the authorities contented themselves with a caution to the author. But action followed his supplemental Dialogue on the Copernican and Ptolemaic Systems. Through that convenient medium which the t.i.tle implies, Galileo makes the defender of the Copernican theory an easy victor, and for this he was brought before the Inquisition in 1633.

After a tedious trial, and threats of "rigorous personal examination,"

a euphemism for "torture," he was, despite the plea--too specious to deceive--that he had merely put the _pros_ and _cons_ as between the rival theories, condemned to abjure all that he had taught. There is a story, probably fict.i.tious, since it was first told in 1789, that when the old man rose from his knees, he muttered his conviction that the earth moves, in the words "e pur si muove." As a sample of the arguments used by the ecclesiastics when they subst.i.tuted, as rare exception, the pen for the f.a.ggot, the reasoning advanced by one Sizzi against the existence of Jupiter's moons, may be cited. "There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body, viz.: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and one mouth. So, in the heavens, as in a macrocosm, or great world, there are two favourable stars, Jupiter and Venus; two unpropitious, Mars and Saturn; two luminaries, the sun and moon, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From these and many other phenomena of Nature, which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. Moreover, the satellites are invisible to the naked eye, and, therefore, can exercise no influence over the earth, and would, of course, be useless; and, therefore, do not exist."