History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0189/01890.txt

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$Title{History Of The Intellectual Development Of Europe
Chapter I. Part I.}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Draper, John William M.D., LL.D.,}
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$Subject{now
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europe
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$Date{1876}
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Title:       History Of The Intellectual Development Of Europe
Book:        Volume II
Author:      Draper, John William M.D., LL.D.,
Date:        1876

Chapter I. Part I.

The Age Of Faith In The West.  The Three Attacks: Northern Or Moral; Western
Or Intellectual; Eastern Or Military; The Northern Or Moral Attack On The
Italian System, And Its Temporary Repulse.

Geographical Boundaries of Italian Christianity. - Attacks upon it.

The Northern or moral Attack. - The Emperor of Germany insists on a
reformation in the Papacy. - Gerbert, the representative of these Ideas, is
made Pope. - They are both poisoned by the Italians.

Commencement of the intellectual Rejection of the Italian System. - It
originates in the Arabian doctrine of the supremacy of Reason over Authority.
- The question of Transubstantiation. - Rise and development of Scholasticism.
- Mutiny among the Monks.

Gregory VII. spontaneously accepts and enforces a Reform in the Church. -
Overcomes the Emperor of Germany. - Is on the point of establishing a European
Theocracy. - The Popes seize the military and monetary Resources of Europe
through the Crusades.

     The realm of an idea may often be defined by geometrical lines.

     If from Rome, as a centre, two lines be drawn, one of which passes
eastward, and touches the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, the other westward,
and crosses the Pyrenees, nearly all those Mediterranean countries lying to
the south of these lines were living, at the time of which we speak, under the
dogma, "There is but one God, and Mohammed is his prophet;" but the countries
to the north had added to the orthodox conception of the Holy Trinity the
adoration of the Virgin, the worship of images, the invocation of saints, and
a devout attachment to relics and shrines.

     I have now to relate how these lines were pushed forward on Europe, that
to the east by military, that to the west by intellectual force.  On Rome, as
on a pivot, they worked; now opening, now closing, now threatening to curve
round at their extremes and compress paganizing Christendom in their clasp;
then, through the convulsive throes of the nations they had inclosed, receding
from one another and quivering throughout their whole length, but receding
only for an instant, to shut more closely again.

     It was as if from the hot sands of Africa invisible arms were put forth,
enfolding Europe in their grasp, and trying to join their hands to give to
paganizing Christendom a fearful and mortal compression.  There were struggles
and resistances, but the portentous hands clasped at last. Historically, we
call the pressure that was then made the Reformation.

     Not without difficulty can we describe the convulsive struggles of
nations so as to convey a clear idea of the forces acting upon them.  I have
now to devote many perhaps not uninteresting, certainly not uninstructive,
pages to these events.

     In this chapter I begin that task by relating the consequences of the
state of things heretofore described - the earnestness of converted Germany
and the immoralities of the popes.

     The Germans insisted on a reformation among ecclesiastics, and that they
should lead lives in accordance with religion.  This moral attack was
accompanied also by an intellectual one, arising from another source, and
amounting to a mutiny in the Church itself.  In the course of centuries, and
particularly during the more recent evil times, a gradual divergence of
theology from morals had taken place, to the dissatisfaction of that remnant
of thinking men who here and there, in the solitude of monasteries, compared
the dogmas of theology with the dictates of reason.  Of those, and the number
was yearly increasing, who had been among the Arabs in Spain, not a few had
become infected with a love of philosophy.

     Whoever compares the tenth and twelfth centuries together cannot fail to
remark the great intellectual advance which Europe was making.  The ideas
occupying the minds of Christian men, their very turn of thought, had
altogether changed.  The earnestness of the Germans, commingling with the
knowledge of the Mohammedans, could no longer be diverted from the misty
clouds of theological discussion out of which Philosophy emerged, not in the
Grecian classical vesture in which she had disappeared at Alexandria, but in
the grotesque garb of the cowled and mortified monk.  She timidly came back to
the world as Scholasticism, persuading men to consider, by the light of their
own reason, that dogma which seemed to put common sense at defiance -
transubstantiation.  Scarcely were her whispers heard in the ecclesiastical
ranks when a mutiny against authority arose, and since it was necessary to
combat that mutiny with its own weapons, the Church was compelled to give her
countenance to Scholastic Theology.

     Lending himself to the demand for morality, and not altogether refusing
to join in the intellectual progress, a great man, Hildebrand, brought on an
ecclesiastical reform.  He raised the papacy to its maximum of power, and
prepared the way for his successors to seize the material resources of Europe
through the Crusades.

     Such is an outline of the events with which we have now to deal.  A
detailed analysis of those events shows that there were three directions of
pressure upon Rome.  The pressure from the West and that from the East were
Mohammedan.  Their resultant was a pressure from the North: it was essentially
Christian.  While those were foreign, this was domestic.  It is almost
immaterial in what order we consider them; the manner in which I am handling
the subject leads me, however, to treat of the Northern pressure first, then
of that of the West, and on subsequent pages of that of the East.

     It had become absolutely necessary that something should be done for the
reformation of the papacy.  Its crimes, such as we have related in Chapter
XII., Vol. I., outraged religious men.  To the master-spirit of the movement
for accomplishing this end we must closely look.  He is the representative of
influences that were presently to exert a most important agency.

     In the train of the Emperor Otho III., when he resolved to put a stop to
all this wickedness, was Gerbert, a French ecclesiastic, born in Auvergne. In
his boyhood, while a scholar in the Abbey of Avrillac, he attracted the
attention of his superiors; among others, of the Count of Barcelona, who took
him to Spain.  There he became a proficient in the mathematics, astronomy, and
physics of the Mohammedan schools.  He spoke Arabic with the fluency of a
Saracen.  His residence at Cordova, where the khalif patronized all the
learning and science of the age, and his subsequent residence in Rome, where
he found an inconceivable ignorance and immorality, were not lost upon his
future life.  He established a school at Rheims, where he taught logic, music,
astronomy, explained Virgil, Statius, Terence, and introduced what were at
that time regarded as wonders, the globe and the abacus.  He laboured to
persuade his countrymen that learning is far to be preferred to the sports of
the field.  He observed the stars through tubes, invented a clock, and an
organ played by steam.  He composed a work on Rhetoric.  Appointed Abbot of
Bobbio, he fell into a misunderstanding with his monks, and had to retire
first to Rome, and then to resume his school at Rheims.  In the political
events connected with the rise of Hugh Capet, he was again brought into
prominence.  The speech of the Bishop of Orleans at the Council of Rheims,
which was his composition, shows us how his Mohammedan education had led him
to look upon the state of things in Christendom: "There is not one at Rome, it
is notorious, who knows enough of letters to qualify him for a door-keeper;
with what face shall he presume to teach who has never learned?" He does not
hesitate to allude to papal briberies and papal crimes: "If King Hugh's
embassadors could have bribed the pope and Crescentius, his affairs had taken
a different turn." He recounts the disgraces and crimes of the pontiffs: how
John XII. had cut off the nose and tongue of John the Cardinal; how Boniface
had strangled John XIII.; how John XIV. had been starved to death in the
dungeons of the Castle of St. Angelo.  He demands, "To such monsters, full of
all infamy, void of all knowledge, human and divine, are all the priests of
God to submit - men distinguished throughout the world for their learning and
holy lives?  The pontiff who so sins against his brother - who, when
admonished, refuses to hear the voice of counsel, is as a publican and a
sinner." With a prophetic inspiration of the accusations of the Reformation,
he asks, "Is he not Anti-Christ?" He speaks of him as "the Man of Sin," "the
Mystery of Iniquity." Of Rome he says, with an emphasis doubtless enforced by
his Mohammedan experiences, "She has already lost the allegiance of the East;
Alexandria, Antioch, Africa, and Asia are separate from her; Constantinople
has broken loose from her; the interior of Spain knows nothing of the pope."
He says, "How do your enemies say that, in deposing Arnulphus, we should have
waited for the judgment of the Roman bishop?  Can they say that his judgment
is before that of God which our synod pronounced?  The Prince of the Roman
bishops and of the apostles themselves proclaimed that God must be obeyed
rather than men; and Paul, the teacher of the Gentiles, announced anathema to
him, though he were an angel, who should preach a doctrine different to that
which had been delivered.  Because the pontiff Marcellinus offered incense to
Jupiter, must, therefore, all bishops sacrifice?" In all this there is
obviously an insurgent spirit against the papacy, or, rather, against its
iniquities.

     In the progress of the political movements Gerbert was appointed to the
archbishopric of Rheims.  On this occasion, it is not without interest that we
observe his worldly wisdom.  It was desirable to conciliate the clergy -
perhaps it might be done by the encouragement of marriage.  He had lived in
the polygamic court of the khalif, whose family had occasionally boasted of
more than forty sons and forty daughters.  Well then may he say, "I prohibit
not marriage.  I condemn not second marriages.  I do not blame the eating of
flesh." His election not only proved unfortunate, but, in the tortuous policy
of the times, he was removed from the exercise of his episcopal functions and
put under interdict.  The speech of the Roman legate, Leo, who presided at his
condemnation, gives us an insight into the nature of his offence, of the
intention of Rome to persevere in her ignorance and superstition, and is an
amusing example of ecclesiastical argument: "Because the vicars of Peter and
their disciples will not have for their teachers a Plato, a Virgil, a Terence,
and the rest of the herd of philosophers, who soar aloft like the birds of the
air, and dive into the depths like the fishes of the sea, ye say that they are
not worthy to be door-keepers, because they know not how to make verses.
Peter is, indeed, a door-keeper - but of heaven!" He does not deny the
systematic bribery of the pontifical government, but justifies it.  "Did not
the Saviour receive gifts of the wise men?" Nor does he deny the crimes of the
pontiffs, though he protests against those who would expose them, reminding
them that "Ham was cursed for uncovering his father's nakedness." In all this
we see the beginning of that struggle between Mohammedan learning and morals
and Italian ignorance and crime, which was at last to produce such important
results for Europe.

     Once more Gerbert retired to the court of the emperor.  It was at the
time that Otho III. was contemplating a revolution in the empire and a
reformation of the Church.  He saw how useful Gerbert might be to his policy,
and had him appointed Archbishop of Ravenna.  On the death of Gregory V. he
issued his decree for the election of Gerbert as pope.  The low-born French
ecclesiastic, thus attaining to the utmost height of human ambition, took the
name of Sylvester II.

     But Rome was not willing thus to surrender her sordid interests; she
revolted.  Tusculum, the disgrace of the papacy, rebelled.  It required the
arms of the emperor to sustain his pontiff.  For a moment it seemed as if the
Reformation might have been anticipated by many centuries - that Christian
Europe might have been spared the abominable papal disgraces awaiting it.
There was a learned and upright pope, an able and youthful emperor; but
Italian revenge, in the person of Stephania, the wife of the murdered
Crescentius, blasted all these expectations.  From the hand of that outraged
and noble criminal, who, with more than Roman firmness of purpose, could
deliberately barter her virtue for vengeance, the unsuspecting emperor took
the poisoned cup, and left Rome only to die.  He was but twenty-two years of
age.  Sylvester, also, was irretrievably ruined by the drugs that had been
stealthily mixed with his food.  He soon followed his patron to the grave. His
steam organs, physical experiments, mechanical inventions, foreign birth, and
want of orthodoxy, confirmed the awful imputation that he was a necromancer.
The mouth of every one was full of stories of mystery and magic in which
Gerbert had borne a part.  Afar off in Europe, by their evening firesides, the
goblin-scared peasants whispered to one another that in the most secret
apartment of the palace at Rome there was concealed an impish dwarf, who wore
a turban, and had a ring that could make him invisible, or give him two
different bodies at the same time; that, in the midnight hours, strange sounds
had been heard, when no one was within but the pope; that, while he was among
the infidels in Spain, the future pontiff had bartered his soul to Satan, on
condition that he would make him Christ's vicar upon earth, and now it was
plain that both parties had been true to their compact.  In their privacy,
hollow-eyed monks muttered to one another under their cowls, "Homagium diabolo
fecit et male finivit."

     To a degree of wickedness almost irremediable had things thus come.  The
sins of the pontiffs were repeated, without any abatement, in all the clerical
ranks.  Simony and concubinage prevailed to an extent that threatened the
authority of the Church over the coarsest minds.  Ecclesiastical promotion
could in all directions be obtained by purchase; in all directions there were
priests boasting of illegitimate families.  But yet, in the Church itself
there were men of irreproachable life, who, like Peter Damiani, lifted up
their voices against the prevailing scandal.  He it was who proved that nearly
every priest in Milan had purchased his preferment and lived with a concubine.
The immoralities thus forced upon the attention of pious men soon began to be
followed by consequences that might have been expected.  It is but a step from
the condemnation of morals to the criticism of faith.  The developing
intellect of Europe could no longer bear the acts or the thoughts that it had
heretofore submitted to.  The dogma of transubstantiation led to revolt.

     The early fathers delighted to point out the agreement of doctrines
flowing from the principles of Christianity with those of Greek philosophy.
For long it was asserted that a correspondence between faith and reason
exists; but by degrees as one dogma after another of a mysterious and
unintelligible kind was introduced, and matters of belief could no longer be
co-ordinated with the conclusions of the understanding, it became necessary to
force the latter into a subordinate position.  The great political interests
involved in these questions suggested the expediency and even necessity of
compelling such a subordination by the application of civil power.  In this
manner, as we have described, in the reign of Constantine the Great,
philosophical discussions of religious things came to be discountenanced, and
implicit faith in the decisions of existing authority required.  Philosophy
was subjugated and enslaved by theology.  We shall now see what were the
circumstances of her revolt.

     In the solitude of monasteries there was every inducement for those who
had become weary of self-examination to enter on the contemplation of the
external world.  Herein they found a field offering to them endless
occupation, and capable of worthily exercising their acuteness.  But it was
not possible for them to take the first step without offending against the
decisions established by authority.  The alternative was stealthy proceeding
or open mutiny; but before mutiny there occurs a period of private suggestion
and another of more extensive discussion.  It was thus that the German monk
Gotschalk, in the ninth century, occupied himself in the profound problem of
predestination, enduring the scourge and death in prison for the sake of his
opinion.  The presence of the Saracens in Spain offered an incessant
provocation to the restless intellect of the West, now rapidly expanding, to
indulge itself in such forbidden exercises.  Arabian philosophy, unseen and
silently, was diffusing itself throughout France and Europe, and churchmen
could sometimes contemplate a refuge from their enemies among the infidel. In
his extremity, Abelard himself looked forward to a retreat among the Saracens
- a protection from ecclesiastical persecution.

     In the conflict with Gotschalk on the matter of predestination was
already foreshadowed the attempt to set up reason against authority.  John
Erigena, who was employed by Hincmar, the Archbishop of Rheims, on that
occasion, had already made a pilgrimage to the birthplaces of Plato and
Aristotle, A.D. 825, and indulged the hope of uniting philosophy and religion
in the manner proposed by the ecclesiastics who were studying in Spain.

     From Eastern sources John Erigena had learned the doctrines of the
eternity of matter, and even of the creation, with which, indeed, he
confounded the Deity himself.  He was, therefore, a Pantheist; accepting the
Oriental ideas of emanation and absorption not only as respects the soul of
man, but likewise all material things.  In his work "On the Nature of Things,"
his doctrine is, "That, as all things were originally contained in God, and
proceeded from him into the different classes by which they are now
distinguished, so shall they finally return to him and be absorbed in the
source from which they came; in other words, that as, before the world was
created, there was no being but God, and the causes of all things were in him,
so, after the end of the world, there will be no being but God, and the causes
of all things in him." This final resolution he denominated deification, or
theosis.  He even questioned the eternity of hell, saying, with the emphasis
of a Saracen, "There is nothing eternal but God." It was impossible, under
such circumstances, that he should not fall under the rebuke of the Church.

     Transubstantiation, as being, of the orthodox doctrines, the least
reconcilable to reason, was the first to be attacked by the new philosophers.
What was, perhaps, in the beginning, no more than a jocose Mohammedan sarcasm,
became a solemn subject of ecclesiastical discussion.  Erigena strenuously
upheld the doctrine of the Stercorists, who derived their name from their
assertion that a part of the consecrated elements are voided from the body in
the manner customary with other relics of food; a doctrine denounced by the
orthodox, who declared that the priest could "make God," and that the
eucharistic elements are not liable to digestion.

     And now, A.D. 1050, Berengar of Tours prominently brought forward the
controversy respecting the real presence.  The question had been formularized
by Radbert under the term transubstantiation, and the opinions entertained
respecting the sacred elements greatly differed; mere fetish notions being
entertained by some, by others the most transcendental ideas.  In opposition
to Radbert and the orthodox party, who asserted that those elements ceased to
be what to the senses they appeared, and actually became transformed into the
body and blood of the Saviour, Berengar held that, though there is a real
presence in them, that presence is of a spiritual nature.  These heresies were
condemned by repeated councils, Berengar himself being offered the choice of
death or recantation.  He wisely preferred the latter, but more wisely resumed
his offensive doctrines as soon as he had escaped from the hands of his
persecutors.  As might be supposed from the philosophical indefensibility of
the orthodox doctrine, Berengar's opinions, which, indeed, issued from those
of Erigena, made themselves felt in the highest ecclesiastical regions, and,
from the manner in which Gregory VII. dealt with the heresiarch, there is
reason to believe that he himself had privately adopted the doctrines thus
condemned.